


the gentle light that strays and vanishes (and returns)

by BeaArthurPendragon



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Amputee Bucky Barnes, Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Baking, Blow Jobs, Bombs, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Brain Fog, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes's Trigger Words, Butt Plugs, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Car Accidents, Caregiver Stress, Childhood Friends, Complete, Conspiracy, Espionage, Friends to Lovers, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra (Marvel), Identity Porn, Kissing, M/M, Masturbation, Mental Health Issues, POV Steve Rogers, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Protective Steve Rogers, Recovery, Rimming, SHIELD, Shooting, Side Effects, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Suicide Attempt, Therapy, Top Steve Rogers, Weight Gain, Whump, antidepressants, temporary impotence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:53:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 56,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27877157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaArthurPendragon/pseuds/BeaArthurPendragon
Summary: Even now there was still some small part of him that always scanned a crowd for him—some small part of him that always fluttered with hope when he saw someone who might be the right height, or whose hair might be the right color. Some small part of him that hoped they’d see each other again. Some small part of him that still wanted their stolen time back.---Captain America's identity was supposed to be a secret, until suddenly it wasn't. Now too famous for special ops in Afghanistan, Steve Rogers is stuck riding a desk at SHIELD's public affairs office and counting down the days till he can turn in his dog tags and leave the sleaze of Washington D.C. behind once and for all.His childhood best friend, Bucky Barnes, is a wounded vet trying to adjust to civilian life after a military career he can't talk about. Even though it's been almost 20 years since they've seen each other, it feels like nothing's changed.Except that everything has.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Rebecca Barnes Proctor, James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Maria Hill & Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter & Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson
Comments: 188
Kudos: 247





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of a weird AU in which the Ten Rings, not al Qaeda, carry out the 9/11 attacks, and Steve, Bucky, Peggy, and the Howlies are all modern characters. 
> 
> Please mind the tags! Feel free to message me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) or [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/) if you need more information about what to expect.
> 
> The title comes from the poem [_Try to Praise the Mutilated World_](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/try-to-praise-the-mutilated-world) by Adam Zagajewski, which ran in the first issue of the _New Yorker_ published after 9/11. 
> 
> Thank you to the incredible Ladra for your thoughtful, meticulous beta work, as well as your wonderful cheerleading. I couldn't have done it without you. 
> 
> Fic is complete.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It begins.

Early in the mornings, the Valley trail in Rock Creek Park was almost deserted, making it the perfect place to run without an audience.

If there was one thing Steve Rogers was sick of, it was audiences.

People had been staring at him nonstop for the last two and a half years, ever since it was revealed that as a teenager he’d participated in a clinical trial for an experimental asthma drug that turned a skinny art student into the second coming of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The trials were halted, Steve was packed off to a top-secret SHIELD medical facility, and well, everyone knows the rest whether he likes it or not: seconded to the Army, the Special Forces training, the deployment to Afghanistan, the elite top-secret international JSOC team he was tasked to.

His real name was classified, but his reputation spread. The right-wing media back home had plenty of names for him, anyway—the Liberator of Waziristan, the Hero of Helmand, the Shield of the Korengal Valley, each more disgusting than the last. But it was the goddamned Mandarin himself who gave him the name that stuck: _Captain America_.

It spread across Afghanistan like wildfire, and it was no time at all before his own team was calling him that, too. It was just a joke—most of the Howling Commandos had dumb nicknames, too, beginning with “Howling Commandos”—but it followed him like a bad smell, and the next thing he knew, the _New York Bulletin_ ’s Kabul bureau chief was calling the chief of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan to confirm the identity of this mysterious American super-soldier that the Ten Rings couldn’t stop talking about.

General Phillips didn’t confirm it, but someone did. Two days later Steve’s photo was on the front page of the Sunday paper.

Suddenly too famous for secret ops, SHIELD brought him home and dumped him in the Triskelion’s Public Affairs department to serve out the last three years of his hitch stateside. After all, why waste the name recognition?

Mostly that meant he had near-weekly appearances on all the cable news networks, speeches on Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day. There were graduation speeches and school PSAs. He'd done _Sesame Street_ twice and _Saturday Night Live_ once. Last year he'd been named People Magazine's _Sexiest Man Alive_. He hated it, to be honest, but he told himself that nothing was ever going to change if the public started tuning the war out, and if this was the only way he could keep them engaged, then so be it.

It worked for a while, anyway.

Now it was April of his third year stateside and there were just five months, three weeks, and one day to get through until he was free. Until then, well, he was resigned to the fact that running alone in the woods at five o’clock in the morning was almost always going to be the best part of his day.

Except this morning he wasn’t alone. This morning another runner emerged from an intersecting trail, almost right on top of him. They both dodged each other quickly with dancing steps and a rueful laugh, then glanced up at each other’s faces to apologize, almost in unison.

“Holy shit,” the runner said, his voice clicking even before his face came into view.

“Oh my God,” Steve breathed, his heart tumbling in his chest. “Hi.”

It had been nearly 20 years since he’d seen Bucky Barnes, but Steve recognized him immediately. He was half a foot taller than he’d been at 16, tanned and muscular in a wiry way, standing with the kind of posture Steve recognized immediately in career soldiers. But the two-week scruff and the ponytail told him he’d been out for a while, and—his eyes flicked involuntarily toward the empty left sleeve of Bucky’s t-shirt as he turned all the way around. _Oh_.

Bucky followed his gaze and shrugged. “Caught an IED outside Bagram a year and a half ago.”

“Hell of a way to lose 10 pounds fast,” Steve blurted.

Bucky barked out a surprised laugh, and there was old familiar glitter in his eyes that Steve remembered from high school. “That’s usually my line.”

Steve grinned to cover up the complicated twist of sadness and guilt that was coiling inside him—that they’d both been in the war at the same time and he hadn’t known it, that he’d gotten hurt while Steve was unhurtable.

“What are you doing here?” Steve asked, pushing the guilt away, letting his excitement about seeing him again after so many years fill the void instead. “God, it’s good to see you. Tell me everything.”

Bucky grinned. “I live here now. Just moved to the neighborhood,” he said, flapping the hem of his t-shirt a little to cool himself off, and Steve tried not to appreciate the glimpse of carved abs he caught in the process. “I work at the State Department now—IT stuff, if you can believe it. Not as exciting as the sandbox, but I can’t say I mind not being shot at anymore.”

“Who were you there with?” Steve asked. “I remember you talked about joining up after high school but I never knew you actually did.”

“107th,” Bucky said, turning out his right arm so Steve could see the black circle and red star insignia of the U.S. Army’s mountain and arctic infantry force tattooed on his bicep.

“The winter soldiers,” Steve said.

“We were too far south for us to get much winter,” Bucky said. “Cold as hell, though.”

“I remember. Spent the better part of 2010 operating out of Jalalabad.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bucky said wryly. “ _Captain America_.”

“You and everyone else,” Steve said, more irritably than he meant to.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” Bucky said quickly. “You must get that all the time. I didn’t mean to—” he glanced down the path toward the trailhead. “God, you haven’t seen me in 20 years. You don’t owe me your time. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“No, I didn’t mean—of course I want to talk to you,” Steve insisted, not wanting him to leave yet. “Look, I’ve got a meeting at State the day after tomorrow. We could get lunch if you want. I’d love to catch up. Really.” Steve bit his lip. “I mean, only if you want. This is weird.”

Bucky gave a rueful smile. “I’d love to, but I don’t rate an office at headquarters. I’m down in Virginia.”

“Virginia?”

“Virginia,” he said, fixing Steve with a steady look that told him not to ask for more details. Which probably meant Langley. Which meant “State Department” was just a cover for the CIA.

Huh.

“Maybe coffee this weekend, though?” Bucky offered instead. “Someplace you recommend?”

“Sure,” Steve said. “There’s a nice place near Columbia Circle I go to often enough that we probably won’t get interrupted. Probably.”

Bucky grinned. “I’ll take my chances,” he said. He fished his phone out of his pocket. “Can I get your number, or is that classified?”

“Nothing about me is classified anymore,” Steve sighed. He dictated it to Bucky now, trying not to admire how rapidly he typed with one thumb, then smiled when his phone buzzed as Bucky texted him his.

“I should get going,” Bucky said apologetically, holding out his hand to shake. “Eight a.m. staff meeting and I still have to figure out my commute. But it was really great seeing you again.”

“Yeah, man,” Steve said, his voice unexpectedly thick as he took the offered hand, surprised by how desperately he wanted to hug him.

“Sunday afternoon,” Bucky said over his shoulder as he turned back toward the trail. “Around four?”

“It’s a date,” Steve said, flushing red. He watched Bucky run until he was out of sight, long-legged and strong-backed, left sleeve fluttering free.

 _Don’t you fucking dare pity him, Rogers_. But he was deeply shaken at how close it meant Bucky—his Bucky, the boy he’d grown up with, who’d understood him better than anyone else in the world, whose smile always made Steve feel like he’d won the lottery—had come to dying without his knowledge.

They were 16 when their lives cracked apart: The planes came and the towers fell, and Bucky’s father stumbled home covered in dust and Steve’s mom had come home from the hospital covered in blood, and nobody could peel themselves away from the news on TV. A smothering blanket of smoke settled over the city and triggered an asthma attack so severe it put Steve in the hospital for two days.

Suddenly their lives felt desperate and death-haunted, because there was no telling when the planes would return, which buildings would fall next, how long the war would last.

Bucky had vowed to join the Army when he turned 18, and that thrilled Steve because it seemed so brave, and it terrified him because he knew his lungs would keep him home, and he was so badly spooked by the severity of his last attack that he became convinced that they would die apart—Bucky from a Ten Rings bullet, Steve from his own broken body.

And then in early December, Bucky’s grandfather in Indiana died, and Bucky’s dad decided the family needed a fresh start anyway and made plans to move back home to take over the family horse farm. And so the two years they thought they still had together suddenly shrank to two weeks. 

They promised to keep in touch, and they did for a little while. But eventually Steve stopped writing as much because after a while all he wanted to say was the one thing he couldn’t—that he missed Bucky so much it was hard to breathe—and he couldn’t keep pretending to care about anything else. And of course Bucky settled right in at his new school just as Steve knew he would, and when he told Steve all about the friends he was making, Steve realized that the only way he was going to survive the separation was to let him go.

Steve couldn’t remember who’d sent the last letter, who’d been the one to not reply. The letters had simply stopped, and they’d moved on.

By the spring, Bucky was just a face in a dream for him, something to long for but never have, someone to imagine in the spring when he found himself kissing the sweet baby goth with the septum ring and purple hair in his art class who’d taught him how to draw manga.

But even now there was still some small part of him that always scanned a crowd for him—that always fluttered with hope when he saw someone who might be the right height, whose hair might be the right color. Some small part of him that hoped they’d see each other again. Some small part of him that still wanted their stolen time back.

And here he was, just like that.

It was too good to be true.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Come on, Steve, focus,” Maria sighed, beaning him neatly between the eyes with a crumpled piece of paper. “This is important.”

“’The United States military does not carry out targeted political assassinations. It never has, and it never will,’” Steve parroted. “I got it.”

“Try to sound like you mean it, okay?” Maria said, exasperated.

“There’s no reason I wouldn’t, right?” Steve asked, a sudden doubt springing to life unbidden inside him. He still had his security clearances, but just because he was _allowed_ to know highly sensitive things didn’t mean he was always told them. He knew his briefings omitted anything classified lest he slip up on air, knew that it meant he wasn’t always privy to all the details, knew that some of his talking points had been carefully workshopped by SHIELD’s lawyers, but the deal he’d made with Maria was that anything he said to the press had to be verifiably true.

And he could tell the lawyers had workshopped this one to death. Maria was very clear that he had to use “carry out” and “political,” that he use the exact phrase wherever possible, that he not improvise even if a reporter pushed him to explain his word choice.

But that morning the entire front page of the _New York Bulletin_ ’s national edition broke the news that over the past decade, more than two dozen warlords, imams, anti-corruption politicians, women’s rights activists, and even a few Western aid workers in Afghanistan had been found dead under the same mysterious circumstances: a single Russian sniper bullet, no rifling.

The only thing linking the attacks to the United States was a goat farmer who claimed to have seen the same Toyota pickup he’d sold to an American for cash three months ago gunning it out of town minutes after the local warlord’s head vaporized in the marketplace. The truck had belonged to his late uncle, he said, and he recognized it by the four telltale bullet holes in the passenger door that the Ten Rings had killed his uncle with.

“I’ve never once asked you to lie, Steve,” Maria said vehemently—so strongly that Steve realized he’d offended her. “We can’t do our jobs if reporters can’t trust us to tell them the truth—you know that.”

“But the _Bulletin_ story isn’t wrong, is it,” Steve said, and it wasn’t a question. He knew the reporter and she was as dogged as they come. After all, she’d broken the story about him.

“Christine Everhart doesn’t cut corners, as well you know,” Maria said. “No, I don’t think the story’s wrong. Someone’s doing it.”

“Just not us.”

Maria glanced down at her coffee before returning her gaze to his. “The United States military does not carry out targeted political assassinations. It never has and it never will.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That night Steve dreamed about Bucky’s last night in Brooklyn.

Bucky had spent the night, because the furniture had already gone into storage and the Barnes family had split up to stay with friends, but the next morning, Bucky would meet his father and his sister at their old place to take a cab to LaGuardia. The next afternoon, Bucky would be in Indianapolis. The next time the sun set, he would be unpacking his life in his new room at his grandparents’ farm in Shelbyville.

After that—neither one of them wanted to think about that. All they knew was that tonight, December 20, 2001, was the last time they were going to see each other for a very, very long time.

It seemed impossible that after a lifetime together, they were expected to just—keep going without each other.

They’d first met in kindergarten, but it wasn’t until second grade, when by some lousy stroke of luck, they each lost a parent—Bucky’s mom to a falling piece of scaffolding, Steve’s dad to a sudden brain hemorrhage—that they became friends. They’d bonded over their losses, Steve supposed, because they had virtually nothing else in common. Whatever it was, it had endured.

They racked up scores of weekend Halo marathons and weekend detentions (Bucky always finished Steve’s fights, and Steve at least tried to return the favor), spent countless hours skateboarding up and down the promenade and countless summer afternoons roaming Coney Island and blowing their allowance on shitty food and carnival games. They were an odd couple, the extroverted star athlete and the shy aspiring comic book artist, but they’d been best friends for so long, no one questioned it.

By the time he turned 15, Steve was head over heels in love with him. He never said so, because it was hopeless—Bucky had kissed more girls than Steve had even spoken to—and besides, the last thing he wanted to do was scare away the person he loved most. So he buried his feelings down deep, watched his best friend grow taller and listened to his voice deepen and tried not to confess his love every time Bucky slung his arm around Steve’s shoulders.

It was a cold night, but Bucky didn’t want to waste it; he wanted to see everything one last time. They bundled up as well as they could and promised to be home by midnight.

They wandered through the neighborhood, first—past their school, doing a desultory turn on the playground carousel, and then past the old church they both attended on Christmas and Easter, and hopped the fence to the cemetery because Bucky wanted to visit his mom one last time, and then, before he could cry, they hopped the fence on the other side and kept walking north, toward the basketball courts where Bucky and his jock friends played pickup games on the weekend.

Brooklyn was lit up for Christmas, though the holiday felt strange and blunted and vaguely frantic. The towers had come down and Steve had gotten sick and now Bucky was leaving him, probably forever, and it seemed like no one could decide whether celebrating was disrespectful to the dead or if not celebrating meant the terrorists had won.

But it was Bucky’s last night and Steve was determined to make it perfect for him. They stopped at Ray’s for his last real New York slice and then at Mike’s for his last black-and-white milkshake and then hopped the subway to Brooklyn Bridge, so Bucky could see the city skyline for the last time. Even the subway itself made them feel nostalgic; the wonderfully necessary intimacy of sitting shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh on a crowded train. It felt good to be pressed up against him, to feel his solid warmth, to feel him there—just there, present, beside him one last time. It was all he needed, he told himself. It was enough.

They got off at the Bridge and then because the Bridge was still closed to pedestrians they did the next best thing and headed for the promenade on the riverfront below. It was windier and colder here, on the water, and despite the thick down coat and the heavy wool cap, Steve’s teeth began to chatter.

“Aw, Stevie, how’re you gonna survive winter without me?” Bucky teased, suddenly reaching for his shoulders and briskly rubbing his arms. “Fuck it, let’s go to California so you don’t freeze to death. I’ll steal us a car to get us there and you’ll do drawings on the Santa Monica pier for rent.”

Steve laughed through his chattering teeth before swallowing his reluctance to leave Bucky’s embrace and playfully batting Bucky’s hands away. “God, Buck, I’m not gonna die. I’m just cold.”

“Okay but—you gotta promise me you’ll take your inhaler with you everywhere, okay?” Bucky said, glaring at him. “You got it now?”

Steve laughed. “Yes, ma.”

“I’m not doing that again,” Bucky said, turning back to fix a hard stare at Lower Manhattan as he rubbed Steve’s arm. “You gotta be careful in the cold. You get wheezy.”

“I swear to fucking God, I never want to talk about my asthma again,” Steve groused, but Bucky just frowned.

“Okay, okay,” Bucky said eventually. “I just worry about your bony little ass.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets and stalked over to the railing to look at the ruin of Lower Manhattan across the river. “I heard it’s still on fire, underground,” he said, nodding toward the great dark gulf where the Twin Towers had once stood. “There’s so much weight on top of it they can’t put it out.”

Steve joined him at the railing. “I heard there’s a mine that’s been on fire in Pennsylvania for like a hundred years,” he said. “You think that’ll burn as long?”

“How the hell would I know?” Bucky asked darkly, then squinted into the wind and turned his face away, as if to look uptown. “Doesn’t feel right, leaving now,” he said.

“No,” Steve agreed.

“You gotta fight for your home,” Bucky said, his hands curling into fists. “You don’t just—leave when it gets hard.”

“Don’t talk like that, Buck,” Steve said. “You sound like those assholes on TV.”

“I don’t mean like that,” Bucky said quickly, and his hands relaxed again. “I just mean—you almost died like, two months ago.”

“I’m fine,” Steve said. He glanced up at Bucky just as he wiped his nose on his sleeve, though whether he was crying or just cold, Steve couldn’t be sure.

“Jesus, Stevie, you must be freezing,” Bucky said suddenly, wrapping his arm around Steve’s shoulders and pulling him close.

Steve pushed away his confusion and allowed himself to lean against Bucky’s side. They fit perfectly like this, Steve thought, his shoulder slotted neatly under Bucky’s armpit, his cheek tucked in around Bucky’s collarbone. He kept his arms crossed across his body as though he were cold, afraid to complete the position, to slide his hand around Bucky’s back and come to rest on his far hip, to pull him even closer. _It’s too dangerous_ , he thought, _it’d give it all away, and Bucky’s last night in New York will be ruined forever because his dumb best friend decided to come on to him._

So he stayed where he was, leaning hard against Bucky’s side, feeling the weight of Bucky’s arm across his shoulders as strong as a hug, curling his fingers into the fabric of his own coat because he couldn’t curl them into Bucky’s. Bucky’s fingers were long and powerful from years of basketball, but that night he cradled Steve’s bony shoulder in his hand as gently as an egg.

After another long few moments, Bucky gently squeezed Steve’s shoulder and let go. “Better?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Steve said, hoping Bucky couldn’t hear how tight his voice was.

“Come on,” Bucky said, turning back toward the subway, tugging Steve’s sleeve as he did. “Let’s get you back home.”

They took the bus back to Steve’s so Bucky could look out the window at Brooklyn for the last time. It took forever, but the bus was nearly empty and neither one of them wanted the night to end, and Steve was glad to be able to sit for a while, after spending hours in the cold, and feel his hands and feet and lungs begin to warm.

They sat in silence side-by-side as the bus made its way through Brooklyn, watching mile after mile of home roll by, bodegas and liquor stores and barber shops and shoe stores and doctor’s offices and clothes stores and jewelry boutiques and churches and florists and schools and real estate offices and thrift shops and hardware stores and bars and restaurants and coffee shops, with signs in a dozen languages, all of them familiar. They couldn’t read Albanian but they recognized it, and Arabic and Italian and Spanish and Mandarin and Hindi and Urdu and Thai and Vietnamese and Korean and Russian and Polish and French, and probably a few more they didn’t even know they knew. This was their world and no matter how far they went, it would never leave them, not really, because Brooklyn was in their bones now. It was in their blood.

Even in his dream, Steve could feel a homesickness he hadn’t felt in years, one he’d learned long ago to shove aside and ignore, a homesickness he’d kept buried for so long that he’d forgotten he’d ever even felt it.

It was the sadness that woke him, the ache for the years they’d lost. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the light was beginning to change. If he left now, he could put another three miles onto his run and still get to work in time. If he left now, maybe he would see Bucky again. If he left now, maybe—

He rubbed his eyes and got up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The 107th is basically a dupe for the 10th Mountain Brigade, the Army's mountain/arctic combat brigade. 
> 
> \---
> 
> I love your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coffee and secrets.

Steve exhaled an anxious breath of relief when he saw that Bucky was already at the café when he arrived. Back corner, back to the wall, clear line of sight of both exits, Steve noticed, trying not to read too much into that. He’d been the same way since he got back, and he knew they were hardly the only ones.

Bucky stood and smiled as Steve approached with his coffee. His hair was loose today, held back by a pair of pushed-up Wayfarers that Steve tried not to find unbearably attractive. His left sleeve was neatly pinned up—no, stitched, he realized as he drew closer—answering Steve’s _none-of-your-damn-business_ question about whether he used a prosthesis when he wasn’t running. 

And then Steve’s heart stopped for a moment because Bucky stepped out from behind the table and held out his arm for a hug.

“C’mere, punk,” he said.

“Good to see you again, jerk,” Steve said, squeezing him tight, and he smelled like tobacco and rosemary—not smoke, just warm and clean and deeply, wonderfully familiar. It was hard to let go of him, but he did, and if he held on a fraction too long, Bucky didn’t seem to notice.

“I got snacks,” Bucky said, waving toward a box of pastries as he sat.

Steve laughed. “I dunno, Buck, we might not have enough,” he said.

“It’s my niece’s fourth birthday tonight,” he said. “Becca's girl, Lucy. Becca’s a biochemist at Johns Hopkins now—they're part of the reason I moved out here. Lucy’s father is out of the picture and dad sold the farm and moved to Florida, so I figured Becca shouldn’t go it alone, you know?”

“They let you be an uncle?”

“I know, right?” Bucky grinned. He quickly scrolled through his phone and called up a selfie of himself and an impossibly adorable toddler in a tiara and a Wonder Woman t-shirt sprawled on a living room carpet. He tried to ignore the fleeting gutted feeling that flared in his chest when he imagined what it would feel like to have his own child rest their head against his shoulder like that, knowing he never would.

“Look at you, all domesticated,” Steve said, handing back the phone.

“I used to take 10-to-1 odds against the Ten Rings without blinking, but if I take her to the zoo and she wants ice cream for lunch, all I can do is ask what flavor,” he said fondly. “What about you? You get back to Brooklyn much? How’s your mom?”

Steve winced and shook his head.

“Oh no,” Bucky said. “What happened?”

“Breast cancer, during my first deployment,” Steve said, and even now it still sounded like a question when he said it, as if he couldn’t believe it was real. “The bad kind—nothing touched it. Went through her like wildfire. I didn’t get home in time.”

“God, that sucks,” Bucky said. “I’m so sorry.”

“This fucking war,” Steve said. “Sometimes—” He shook his head. Captain America wasn’t allowed to finish that sentence in public until August.

Bucky gave him a steady look that told Steve he didn’t have to. “I get it.”

“It’s all right,” Steve said, though even now he was still trying to convince himself of that, even 15 years later. He reached for a croissant, mostly just to pick at it. “She’s next to Dad, which is good. I go to New York for work a few times a year so I try to visit them when I can.”

“Cheers to your mom, man,” Bucky said, tapping his coffee cup against Steve’s. “She was a good woman.”

“Should’ve brought a flask,” Steve said.

“Next time,” Bucky said with a grin, and Steve flushed a little at the thought of a next time.

It was then that he noticed that the usual double-takes of the other customers—which almost didn’t even register anymore—had escalated into poorly-concealed photo snaps.

“Excuse me,” Steve said, standing up. “Let me shut this down.”

“No,” Bucky said, reaching forward and touching his arm. “It’s fine. Let them get their Instagram kicks. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” Steve said. “You deserve your privacy.”

“I appreciate that,” Bucky said. “But it’s probably too late now. It’s not worth the fight.” Then he smiled. “Are you worried that people will think it’s romantic?”

“No,” Steve said quickly—maybe too quickly. “I got outed when everything else about me got outed. I just don’t want you to have to deal with any blowback.”

“From what?”

“Fame,” Steve said. “Gossip. Especially—”

“Because of my arm?” Bucky supplied.

Steve gave a vague shrug. “I get a lot of trolls on my social media. You don’t deserve that.”

“And then what? After weeks of fevered speculation, you finally put out a statement that you met an old high school friend for coffee and you should just leave the poor guy alone because he’s got a Purple Heart and shame on you all?”

“I mean, kind of?”

“Oh, Christ,” Bucky said, edging his chair closer to Steve’s and indicating for him to do the same. “Life’s too short for that. Scoot in.”

“Okay,” Steve said warily, but he did. Sitting this close to him, Steve could see the little crinkles at the corners of his eyes and flashes of silver in his beard. It was distinguished and handsome and made Steve unbearably sad because he’d probably never have either himself, while Bucky had come by them too soon. He was only 36. He was too young for this. Then Bucky leaned in toward him and held up his phone.

“Say cheese,” he said, and Steve shoved his feelings away and smiled.

He watched over Bucky’s shoulder and tried not to think about what he could do with those dexterous fingers of his as he lay the phone on the table and rapidly cropped, posted, and captioned the selfie one-handed.

_I *told* y’all I went to high school with @CaptainAmerica._

Steve laughed and shook his head. “You’re in for it now, Buck,” he said.

Bucky shot him a wry grin. “I don’t mind giving people something else to stare at.”

“I’m sorry that happens to you,” Steve said softly, suddenly feeling the mirth of the moment drain away.

“Oh, no, please don’t do that,” Bucky said. “I don’t want—I don’t know. Not that.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “How about this: Feel free to weaponize my celebrity as a distraction anytime.”

Bucky laughed softly. “That’s why I never looked you up, by the way,” he said. “I figured everyone was going to start coming out of the woodwork after you got outed, and I didn’t want you to think—” he shrugged. “You know.”

Steve gave a wincing smile. “I wouldn’t have minded hanging out again,” he said, then gestured vaguely at the table. “Obviously.”

“I guess the other reason is that I might not have been ready to be seen,” he admitted, looking at his coffee cup instead of Steve. “It’s still weird being around people who knew me before, having to tell the story and deal with their feelings over and over again. It can be—exhausting.” He shrugged. “Well, you probably know what that’s like, too.”

“Not really,” Steve said. “In all other respects, having your entire life story printed on the front page of the Sunday _Bulletin_ is a giant bag of dicks, but at least I never have to explain what happened to me.”

“Did you ever find out who leaked it?”

“Nope,” Steve said irritably. “And I hate it, you know. Spending my days on TV. I should still be over there, not sitting here dodging amateur paparazzi.” He shook his head. “I really shouldn’t complain about being able to sleep safe in my bed every night, I guess, but fame sucks. There’s no two ways about it. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t want it. The minute my hitch is up, I’m leaving town and never coming back.”

“How much longer you got?”

“Five months, two weeks, five days, not that I’m counting.” Steve picked at his croissant. “I bought a cabin in the mountains last year and honestly, my plan is just to hide out there, fixing it up and, I don’t know, painting birds until everyone in America forgets me.”

Bucky made a sad face. “Sounds lonely.”

Steve shrugged. “At least the birds don’t have agendas. But this town—” he shook his head.

“They call it a swamp for a reason.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got friends, though, right? People you trust?”

“A few,” Steve acknowledged, wondering if Nat counted. Technically she was his handler, but they’d worked together so long that Steve could read her like a book, and they liked each other well enough to call each other friends. Maria was his boss, but she was a straight shooter.

He had the Howlies, of course—he trusted them with his life—but it was hard to maintain a connection when they were still out there risking their lives every day while he was home playing the dancing monkey on TV.

And then of course there was Peggy. She’d been the Howlies’ cultural support officer—her job was to interact with (and interrogate, if necessary) the women they encountered—and though technically she wasn’t special forces, she slept, ate, rode, and fought alongside them on every mission. She’d been riding a desk for MI6 in London ever since an IED shattered her femur, and though nothing could really reproduce the closeness of splitting a contraband can of warm Budweiser in the shade of the roasting shipping container that served as their quarters whenever they were back at base, they still talked and texted a few times a month. He trusted her more than anyone else in the world.

“You?” he asked to avoid elaborating. He knew he was lonely in D.C., but it had been a while since he’d taken stock of how _alone_ he was, too. It shamed him.

“Haven’t really been here long enough to meet a lot of people, but I’ve got a group of buddies from Walter Reed that I see most weeks, so that’s nice.” Bucky picked up a coffee stirrer and began to twirl it through his fingers the way he used to do with pencils in school, and Steve smiled. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

Steve nodded at his hand. “Remember when you were trying to see how fast you could twirl a pen in Mrs. Gellar’s class? You sent it flying into Nina Santangelo’s face and her boyfriend—what was his name? Kyle something—he jumped up and just tagged you right on the jaw. Dropped you on the floor like a bowling pin.”

Bucky laughed—a deep, genuine laugh that made Steve laugh too. “And then you, dumbass, jumped up and tried to hit him back.”

“It’s not like you hit her on purpose, and anyway, you were still sitting down,” Steve protested. “It was a cheap shot.”

“We always had each other’s backs, didn’t we?” Bucky said, and he was grinning, but there was a wistfulness too that was hard to miss.

“To be fair, I think you had mine a hell of a lot more than I had yours in those days,” Steve said ruefully.

“Well, now you can return the favor.”

“Oh? Planning on starting more fights?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Bucky shot Steve a familiar conspiratorial look. “I might still have some trouble left up my remaining sleeve.”

They kept talking for another hour, the years—decades—gradually sloughing away as they realized, in that way that you only do around people you’ve known forever, how much of their old selves remained. Their bodies had changed but there was still so much left to recognize each other, the old familiar snorts and eyerolls and fidgets and cadences, the dimple in Bucky’s left cheek and the way his right eyebrow always quirked higher than his left when he was being sarcastic. It was the first time Steve had spent any amount of time with anyone who had known him as a child since his mother died, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so _known_. It was disorienting and wonderful at the same time, and he never wanted it to end. 

When it was time for Bucky to head out for Baltimore, Steve carried the box of pastries to his Jeep. Bucky graced him with another hug and a promise to hang out again soon, and then Steve stood on the sidewalk until he got to the end of the block and turned left out of sight.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At a quarter to six the next day, just as Steve was packing up for the night, Natasha stepped into his office, closed and locked the door, and dropped a thick file on Steve’s desk.

“Thought you might want to know I looked into the guy you’re seeing,” she said.

Steve’s jaw tightened. “I’m not _seeing_ him, Nat,” he said. “We went to high school together. He lives here now. We ran into each other last week and wanted to catch up. And he’s not into men.”

“If you say so,” she said, shrugging with exaggerated casualness.

“I don’t want to see that,” Steve said, pushing the dossier away. “That’s creepy.”

“Eh,” she said. “Only marginally creepier than Instagram-stalking him.”

“Haven’t done that, either,” Steve said, because it literally had never occurred to him to. The public affairs intern, Darcy, ran the official @CaptainAmerica social media accounts and he’d deleted his private ones after the _Bulletin_ article. From what he understood from Darcy’s daily engagement reports, he wasn’t missing anything.

“Oh my God, you Boy Scout—he tagged you in a picture. That’s all the permission you need,” Nat grumbled, digging her phone out of her pocket. She called up the app and slid the phone across the desk.

The account was recent, a little over a year old, and Bucky didn’t seem to post often. There were pictures of horses from the farm, some Christmas photos of the Barnes clan, a few backyard parties with people Steve didn’t recognize but who looked mostly military—his VA buddies, if the prosthetic limbs and burns and wheelchairs were any indication. There was a recurring theme of random things he’d seen on his morning runs—sunrises, weird trash, an impressive collection of shoes slung over a power line, a balloon caught in a tree. There was a picture of a shooting range target with the tightest grouping of bullet holes Steve had ever seen (captioned: _Still got it_ ) and a picture of a black Ducati Scrambler parked on a city street (captioned: _Hi gorgeous_ ) and a picture of an easy snowboard run (captioned: _Just shredded the fuck out of the bunny slope, AMA_ ).

The only photo of himself was a bathroom selfie taken last September. He was wearing a blue button-down with a tie, left sleeve stitched up as it had been at the café, and a comically skeptical look on his face that made Steve laugh out loud. The caption read: _New look, I guess_.

Steve cleared his throat, closed the app, and gave Natasha the phone back.

“Is the file really necessary?” he asked.

“You’ll understand when you see it,” she said.

“Want to give me the highlights?” Steve asked.

“Sure. James Buchanan Barnes. Born March 10, 1985, Brooklyn. Mom died when he was seven, Dad moved the family back home to Indiana after the towers fell in ’01. Graduated from Shelbyville High in 2004, top of his class. Didn’t do quite so well at West Point, but he was in the top third of his class with a double major in Russian and computer science. He was the best sharpshooter in his class all four years, and was the best in the school the final two. Went to Fort Benning first for sniper training, where, again, he finished best in class. After that, the 107th in upstate New York.

“He deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in 2009 and did three tours, all told. He was operating out of Bagram in November 2018 when his convoy hit an IED. He was the only survivor in his vehicle. Spent three months at Walter Reed getting put back together, then went back to Indiana in February to recuperate. Came back to D.C. last August for one last surgery and decided to stay.”

“He said he worked at State,” Steve said. “In a job so perfectly bland that it’s got to be an Agency cover.”

Natasha gave a tight smile. “He’s on the Russia desk at Langley now, analyzing cybercrime.”

Steve scowled at her. “You’ve got that look on your face.”

Natasha nodded at the folder. “Just—Steve. Look.”

Steve flipped the cover open. The first sheet was strictly biographical—more or less exactly what Natasha had just told him. The second page was almost entirely redacted. As was the third, the fourth, the fifth, and all the rest. It was far more heavily redacted than his own file, and most of Steve’s missions had been classified Top Secret. Whatever Bucky had done, it was sensitive as hell.

“What in the world was he up to?” Steve murmured, sifting through the pages one by one.

“Hell if I know,” Natasha said. “And Steve, I know a lot more than you do.”

He shoved the folder back across the desk toward her. “Why are you showing me this?”

“Because this means he’s going to have to lie to you, Steve. A lot. And he’s probably never going to be allowed to tell you why.” She gathered up the folder and stood up. “And you need to be prepared to live with that.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, yes, I know if Bucky went to West Point, he would have been commissioned as a lieutenant, not a sergeant. *Handwaves*
> 
> \---
> 
> Thanks for reading so far! I live for your comments. 
> 
> I'm also on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/) if you want to connect/ask questions there!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The old lie: _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end note for content warnings.

The more TV Steve did, the more he hated it. Oh, he was more _comfortable_ on camera now, much better at staying on message and gracefully pivoting away from traps, but he was increasingly dismayed by the futility of it all. Maria would drill him on his talking points on the way to the studio, he’d do his deep breathing to clear his mind while he endured the makeup chair, he’d clip the microphone to his uniform lapel just above the crossed arrows of his special forces insignia, pop the earpiece into his ear with practiced ease, look into the camera, chitchat a little with the producer to check the sound levels, and patiently and amiably—always amiably—educate the viewing audience on the complexities of war.

But he was rapidly losing confidence that what he said made any kind of difference at all. Nobody watched the news for information anymore—just evidence to support opinions already calcified by the internet long ago. He was never going to change anyone’s mind, never going to make them reconsider what they thought they knew, never expand anyone’s world view. Sometimes he thought his only purpose was to sell SHIELD’s agenda to the politicians in charge of allocating its budget every year.

He never thought he would miss the war, but he did. It wasn’t that he wanted to kill anyone—no, that part would haunt him for the rest of his life—but there was a clarity of purpose in combat that was impossible to come by anywhere else. Get in. Neutralize the threat. Secure whatever needed to be secured. Keep the civilians alive. Keep your team alive. Nothing else mattered.

 _And especially not this_ , Steve thought as he adjusted his earpiece and double-checked his mic. _I’m just a dancing monkey._

He nodded as the producer began counting down with her fingers as the red light on the camera came on and his earpiece crackled to life.

_“With us tonight is SHIELD spokesman Captain Steve Rogers in our Washington studio, here to discuss rumors of a secret assassination program in the Middle East. Captain Rogers, welcome.”_

Steve squared his shoulders and plastered a smile on his face. “Hi, Anderson. Always happy to be here.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later that night, he stood in his kitchen in his pajama pants, drinking a glass of his good scotch at the counter, with Peggy on speakerphone. It was 3 a.m. in London, but Peggy didn’t sleep much anymore. Neither of them did, really.

She'd been out longer than he had. Three weeks before the _Bulletin_ story broke, an IED had taken out the front left quarter of the Jeep she was riding in, sending them tumbling down a low hill alongside the road. When she came to in the smoking wreck of the truck, her left leg was shattered and the headless corpse of the driver, Cpl. Jonathan Juniper, was lying in her lap, his blood and bones and brains spattered across her face and chest. The medic, Morita, was afraid that she was going to bleed out if they tried to pry her loose, so they just had to sit with her until the Medevac came with the tools to cut her free. It had taken over an hour.

She’d been shot twice already, in the shoulder during a raid in Helmand, but it was the crushed femur that finally killed her military career. The desk job at MI6 bored her to death, but at least it mattered, or at least she could convince herself that it did. Most of the time, anyway.

“I caught your hostage video tonight, darling,” she said merrily. It was meaner than her usual ribbing, which meant she was in a mood. “You didn’t believe a word you were saying, did you?”

“How the hell would I even know anymore?” Steve complained, and he knew it sounded like a whine, but he didn’t care. “I hate this fucking game so much.”

“I know. But it’s only a few more months. You can do it,” she said. “And then just think, come fall, you and I will be roasting our pasty hides on the beach in Antigua without a care in the world for two whole weeks. I’ve already got three new bikinis. It’s a pity you’ll never appreciate them.”

“I’m sure someone there will.”

Peggy gave a lascivious little laugh. “Speaking of _someone_ , we have to discuss your Instagram activity.”

“I have no Instagram activity. SHIELD’s Public Affairs department runs that account.”

“Stop playing dumb, Steven. I’m referring to the handsome brunet at the coffee shop.”

“Yes, I _know_ what you’re referring to,” Steve sighed, forcing nonchalance into his voice. “We caught up over coffee. That’s all.”

“You want to do more than catch up, darling,” Peggy drawled. “There was _sex_ in your eyes.”

Steve laughed in surprise. If there was one thing fame had taught him, it was how to automatically arrange his face into a perfectly neutral but good-natured smile that telegraphed precisely squat about his inner life anytime someone pointed a camera at him—even his schoolboy crush. “There was not.”

Peggy gave a disbelieving hum that dissolved into a weird laugh, and then Steve heard the clink of ice in a glass and his heart sank as he glanced up at the calendar by his fridge. The date had snuck up on him.

“Hey, Madge,” Steve asked suddenly, seriously, using the shortened version of her call sign, _Majesty_ , to get her attention. “How deep in the bag are you right now?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. It’s three in the morning. I’m hardly going to drink coffee, am I?”

“Peg.”

“I don’t want your fucking pity, Steven,” she said. “Or your fucking _concern_ , or your fucking—any of it. Just because I’m a woman, I can’t have a bad fucking night? Or a bad fucking week? I can’t raise a fucking toast to Junior when I think about him?”

“Of course not, buddy. It just seems like it’s been more than a bad week, you know?” Steve said, trying to keep his voice even. “I think it might be time for you to talk to someone.”

“You saw the same things I did. You lost the same job I did. You probably have the same fucking nightmares I do. _You_ talk to someone.”

 _I wasn’t pinned in a burned-out Humvee in a bomb crater for over an hour praying I wouldn’t bleed to death with a dead kid in my lap and half his head smeared across my face,_ Steve wanted to say, but didn’t.

“I’m not trying to lecture you, Peg,” Steve said gently. “I just hate the idea of you going through this alone.”

“Of course I’m going through it alone, darling. I’m British,” she said wearily. “Steve, I’m fine. Or no, I’m not, but I will be. It’s just—the anniversary’s always hard, you know? I’ll be all right, I promise.”

Steve sighed. It wasn't just the anniversary that was hard for her, but there was no point in arguing when she was drunk. “Call if you’re not, all right?" he said instead. "Day or night, I don’t care.”

She made a small anguished noise and then there was a long pause—so long that Steve checked to make sure the call was connected. But then he heard her fumble with the phone and he realized that she’d just muted her end of the line for a moment. “You’ll answer the phone on TV, will you?” she asked, trying not all that successfully to shape her ragged voice into something light.

“For you?” Steve said, and London had never felt so far away. “I’ll answer it anytime.”

“Even if you’re in the middle of fucking that gorgeous brunet?” she asked puckishly, sounding a bit more like herself.

Steve spit out a strangled laugh. “Peggy.”

“I’m kidding,” she said, and she laughed for real, and Steve relaxed a fraction of an inch. “All right. Just for you, Stevie boy, I’m going to go put on a pot of herbal tea and take a hot bath and try to manage my feelings in a healthier way tonight.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Don’t push your luck,” she said seriously. “Steve, I love you. I love that you care about me. This will pass. It always does.”

“Okay, Peg,” Steve said reluctantly, because he knew she was lying, but he was four thousand miles away and couldn’t do anything else. “Love you back. Be careful. Please.”

Steve hung up the phone and then threw it over the counter toward the sofa, where it landed with a soft thump.

“Fuck.” He refilled his glass and began to pace his apartment as he sipped, trying to make himself focus on the sweet burn of the alcohol as it seeped down his throat and into his belly. He couldn’t get drunk anymore, but sometimes he could approximate a mild buzz, if the liquor was hard and plentiful enough and he concentrated on the heat of it. It probably wasn’t even a real buzz—just some Pavlovian memory of one—but it was enough to take the edge off all the same.

_Drinking to cope with Peggy’s drinking, Rogers? A-plus life choices there, pal._

Well, he wasn’t perfect.

He refilled his glass again and carried it into the small second bedroom that served as his home office/gym/attic and opened the closet door. There, along the floor, were three plastic crates that contained all that remained of his life in Brooklyn. One contained his mother’s dearest things and one, much smaller, held his father’s. Not for the first time he tried not to grieve for the fact that his parents’ lives could be distilled down to such small boxes. He tried not to let himself think that when his turn came, the only place his things would go would be a museum.

He could adopt, of course, assuming he could find an agency willing to give him a child. It was hard for single men to adopt, though; harder still for gay ones. Single, gay science experiments? He wasn’t holding his breath. He was still human in the eyes of the law, his lawyer assured him, even if his DNA was no longer compatible, but he wondered if human-in-the-eyes-of-the-law was enough.

But there was no point in wishing for impossible things. His father was dead and his mother was dead and Junior was dead and he would never have kids and he was probably never going to find a man who wanted to marry a lab rat who would never grow old with him and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

He should call Junior’s mother tomorrow, he thought.

He dragged out the third crate, the one his mother had packed for him before she died that contained all his treasures from his childhood bedroom. There was the stuffed Curious George doll he’d had since he was a baby and the Star Wars action figures and the baseball cards and the thick bundle of vintage comic books he’d carefully boarded and bagged in mylar before he moved into his college dorm. There was also a thick envelope of Polaroids, six yellowing sketchbooks, a shoebox of floppy disks no computer could read anymore, and all his yearbooks.

He pulled out the yearbooks, opening each one to the first page of his class in order so he could chart Bucky as he grew from age 5, 8, 13—all the way to 16. Noted how his face lengthened and sharpened, cheekbones emerging and jaw beginning to harden, acne jostling for space on his chin with awful wisps of hair that he didn’t quite figure out how to shave properly until high school. (Not that Steve could judge—he was a late bloomer, still looked like a kid well after Bucky started to look like a man.) Noted how his hair grew and shortened and grew again, finally terminating in a kind of shag that was popular at the time but looked ridiculous now.

But all Steve could think about right now was the fact that, in his last yearbook photo, Bucky had been the same age as that teenaged boy in the village outside Jalalabad who pointed his ancient Soviet AK-47 at Junior and wouldn’t drop it, wouldn’t take his finger off the trigger, was probably more scared of what the Ten Rings would do to his family if he surrendered than of dying at American hands.

They’d pleaded with the kid as long as they could—longer than they should have, long enough for the Ten Rings militia to start surrounding them—and Steve had to make the hard call, and he did. Steve had saved Junior's life that day. Bought him another six weeks, anyway. 

The boy had been just three years younger than Junior, two kids squaring off in a war neither one of them wanted any part in. All Junior had wanted to do was pay for college. All this kid wanted—well, Steve didn’t know, and never would, he supposed, and that was always going to be on him. 

He took a long sip of scotch and wiped his eyes and wiped them again but it was too late.

“Shit, kid, I’m sorry,” he said to the air. “I’m so sorry.”

But the air didn’t answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Graphic descriptions of war and a car accident, as well as alcohol abuse.
> 
> \---
> 
> I live for your comments!
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A confession.

Four days later he was walking up to Bucky’s apartment with a six-pack of fancy craft beer, a small wrapped box, and an invitation to watch the Mets’ opening day on his enormous new TV. They’d run into each other at the park twice that week, and while Steve knew it was eventually going to become impractical to stop and talk every time—they both had commutes and jobs waiting on them—it was clear neither one of them was ready to dial it back to a friendly wave.

So they’d stopped and talked for a few minutes and realized they wanted to keep talking more—they always seemed to want to keep talking more—so Bucky invited him over to watch the game. Big loud bars weren’t really his thing anymore, he’d said apologetically.

“Same, pal,” Steve had said, and it wasn’t just to make him feel better about it.

Bucky lived in a simply but comfortably furnished loft on the fourth floor of a converted factory about three blocks from the park. Steve didn’t want to guess what it cost, but he was pretty sure whatever had been blacked out in Bucky’s file had paid for it.

“This place is fantastic,” Steve said as Bucky let him in, noticing a control panel for a sophisticated security system on the wall next to the door as Bucky shut it behind him.

“It’s ridiculous,” Bucky admitted, taking the beer into the kitchen. He kept talking over his shoulder as he loaded the bottles into the fridge. Steve could see a few boxes still stacked in the back corner of the living room from where he stood. “The real estate agent told me I deserved a little luxury after serving three tours and damn, if she didn’t hook me like a fish,” Bucky said wryly as he returned, then glanced at the box in Steve’s hand. “Did you want to put that down?”

“Oh, right,” Steve said. He held out the gift box. “For you. Housewarming gift.”

“You didn’t have to,” Bucky said, taking it with a shy smile.

“It’s nothing—” Steve started. “It’s just a little thing.”

Bucky carried the box over to the dining table to open it, and then burst out laughing as he peeled the tissue paper away from the glass frame. The frame held a yellowing, fading caricature Steve had done featuring the two of them leaping exuberantly over the New York City skyline with fists raised in triumph. Steve couldn’t exactly remember when he’d done it, but from the thick-lined style and the garish colors, it was obviously right around the time he discovered the cheesy glory of the Golden Age of comics. He had found it tucked away between the pages of his 10th grade yearbook just before he put it away the other night. 

“Oh my God,” Bucky said, lifting it up for a closer look and beaming with pleasure. Steve blushed a little at his smile. “I remember this! I can’t believe you kept it all these years. I love it. Thank you.”

“Thank my mom. She packed up my old bedroom before she got too sick,” Steve said. “She wanted to make sure none of my important stuff got thrown out if she died while I was deployed.”

“That sounds like her,” Bucky said, smiling. “She always had her lists.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, unexpectedly touched. It had been so, so long since he’d spoken to anyone who had known her.

Bucky nodded but didn’t say anything for a minute, just looked at the cartoon in the frame. “You know why she saved this?” he asked finally, turning the frame so Steve could see it. “She wanted you to remember that there were still people in the world who cared about you.”

Steve smiled wanly at that, wanting to believe it.

“I know where to put it,” Bucky said, nodding toward the living area.

Steve followed him toward a patch of wall above a gas fireplace that was covered with photos of his family and friends. There were old black-and-white photos of his grandparents and great-grandparents mixed up with faded snapshots of his parents as a young couple in college and less-faded snapshots of Bucky and Rebecca as children—Steve recognized the playground at the end of their block. There were photos from vacations to Florida and Niagara Falls and then there was a photo of the siblings from high school, maybe not long after they moved back to Indiana, sitting side by side on the fence surrounding the horse corral at the farm.

“You’ve got a nice shrine going here,” Steve said admiringly.

Bucky gave a slightly pained smile that Steve couldn’t decipher, then placed the frame on the mantel below them, next to a snapshot of his niece covered in paint and grinning like she’d just landed on the moon.

“Kid after my own heart,” Steve said.

“’Bout as mature, too,” Bucky joked, and whatever nerve Steve had stepped on had quieted.

Moving on down the wall, there was a small photo of Bucky in his West Point cadet uniform, rifle in one hand, sharpshooter award in his left, with his chest pushed out with pride and a cocky-as-hell grin on his face. And there were a handful of photos from his deployments—a formal portrait of his unit wearing khaki camo taken in front of a wall of sandbags at a forward operating base somewhere, but the other three or four were just shitty loving candids of him and his buddies goofing around in camp. They were the kind of pictures every soldier has, or wishes they’d taken—the images they try to force themselves to recall when other, worse memories start to close in at night, when the world gets too quiet to properly drown them out.

In those photos he was sunburned and strong and filthy and exhausted, but also genuinely happy to be in the company of his men.

 _He was the only survivor_ , Natasha had said.

Finally, at the far end of the collection, there was one more. Bucky was home again, back on the farm, leaning against the corral fence again. One of the horses had come up behind him and sweetly pressed her nose against the side of Bucky’s face. He was reaching up under her chin with his right arm to pat her cheek, and he was smiling a little, but not really. He was much too thin and drawn and pale, with dark circles under his eyes and a set to his jaw that made it plain he was in pain. His left arm was heavily scarred from shoulder to elbow and hung in a sling.

"That's Bluebell," Bucky said. "One of our boarders, but I think she liked me better than she liked her people." 

“When was this?” Steve asked softly.

“Last July,” Bucky said. “Wasted the better part of a year trying to save that arm. Came off a couple weeks later.”

“Oh man. I’m so sorry.”

“It was my choice, you know,” Bucky said, a note of false reassurance in his voice, as though he was still trying to convince himself it was true. “It wasn’t good for anything anymore, and the pain was—” He shook his head. “Then my wound got infected again and that was the last straw.” He glanced fleetingly at Steve before he looked at the photo again. “I just couldn’t live like that anymore. The doctor had been offering to take it off for months, and that time I finally said yes.”

“It must have been awful.”

Bucky made a noise of agreement. “Becca understood, but my dad had a hard time with it, you know? I mean, I get it—you never want to see anything happen to your kid, and from his perspective seeing me without the arm must have been really hard. I was hoping he’d start to come around, now that he can see how much better I’m doing, but—” he shrugged. “He thinks I gave up too soon.”

“You weren’t giving up, you were moving on,” Steve said. “Sounds like it was just holding you back.”

“Yeah, it was,” Bucky said.

“Then as far as I’m concerned, it was the right call.” Just then Steve noticed a large frame, about two feet by three, leaning face-down against the wall. Without thinking, he reached down to pick it up.

“What’s this?” he asked as he turned it around.

“Oh, um—” Bucky said, flushing red. “I don’t know what to do with that one. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

The picture was a black-and-white photo of Bucky in jeans but no shirt, standing in front of a draped fabric background. He was gazing serenely beyond the lower right corner of the frame, as though he was thinking about something good. His hair was loose around his chin, not as long as it was now, and his right arm was crossed over his chest, his hand lightly resting on his sternum, fiddling with his dog tags hanging from the chain around his neck. He was still slender, but he’d regained much of his lost weight and his posture was relaxed, no longer tensed against the pain that had pummeled him constantly since returning home.

The reason was plain: His left arm was gone at the shoulder, his collarbone terminating in a small mound of scar tissue. There were more scars around and below the amputation, a mix of burns and shrapnel, spreading down his side and across his chest and stomach. Even without color it was clear that they were older than the amputation—presumably from his original injury. From the looks of it, keeping the arm as long as he had seemed like a miracle.

A photo like that could easily have come off as exploitative or leering, but it hadn’t. Whoever had taken it had known exactly what they were doing, because there was a delicate, cushioning quality to the light that seemed to caress rather than expose him. The effect was beautiful. _He_ was beautiful.

“This is stunning, Buck,” Steve said genuinely. “It’s amazing.”

“It was Becca’s idea,” Bucky said. “There’s a photographer that came to Walter Reed and did these for free—it’s supposed to help wounded vets appreciate what their bodies look like now, I guess? I really wasn't sold on the idea but I figured I didn't have much to lose, so I did it. This was taken about four months after my surgery. I didn’t regret it—I don’t _regret_ it—but for a while afterward I couldn’t look in the mirror without panicking, wondering if I’d made some horrible mistake.” He reached up and covered his stump, idly rubbing his thumb along his collarbone. “I’m still not used to it, to be honest, but that was the day I decided I was going to stop second-guessing it.”

“What were you thinking about?” Steve asked. “You look—peaceful.”

“I think I was mostly just relieved that my life wasn’t revolving around that stupid arm anymore,” Bucky said. “That must sound crazy.”

“Doesn’t sound crazy at all,” Steve said. “I know a thing or two about wanting to get your life back.”

In the end, they decided that the bedroom was the best place for the picture—and if Bucky was as flustered as Steve was at being in that part of the apartment together, he didn’t show it. Of course, Steve couldn’t help but scout it out, noting that it was as nicely and as comfortably furnished as the rest of the place, with a large bed piled with pillows and a thick rug underfoot that he suddenly wanted to curl his toes into. It was a soft, soothing room—a world and a half away from the tents and the bivouacs they’d both lived in for years.

It made the cast-iron gate over the window seem all the more out of place. It was prettily designed, with whorls and curls and twists, but there was no hiding the padlock hanging from the latch.

And the bed was too perfectly made, Steve realized suddenly. Wherever he slept at night, it wasn’t there. _The sofa_ , he thought. Clear line of sight to the door, easy access to the balcony. That was probably where he slept.

They settled on a spot between the closet and the window, a nice little nook with a low bookshelf stacked with science fiction and fantasy novels.

Bucky laughed a little ruefully when he noticed Steve eyeing the spines. “Insomnia,” he said. “I don’t really like to think about the real world at three in the morning.”

“My go-to is comic books,” Steve admitted, measuring the wall so he could mark the spot for the hook. “The old stuff, from the ‘40s and ‘50s. There’s a guy at Sanctum Sanctorum Comics who’s a wizard at finding them for me.”

He carefully lifted the frame and fit it onto the hook. As he did, he found himself at eye level with Bucky’s torso, unable to miss the definition of his abs, or the fine line of hair running from his navel to the waistband of his jeans. The Greeks couldn’t have carved a finer figure. Speaking of art.

He cleared his throat to distract his dick and stepped back to inspect his work. “That look about right to you?” he asked.

Bucky gave a skeptical little laugh. “Well. It’s level, at least,” he said.

Steve chewed his lip, uncertain what kind of reassurance was appropriate to offer. “It looks good there,” he finally offered lamely.

Bucky looked at the portrait for a long minute, then up at Steve with a quirked-up half-smile. “Game’s almost on,” he said. “Thought I’d make nachos.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So they made nachos and drank beer and half-watched the game. They talked about nothing and everything, books they’d read, movies they liked, restaurants Steve recommended. Bucky caught Steve up on the latest adventures of Lucy and Steve regaled Bucky with the handful of live-TV horror stories he usually shared at cocktail parties for a laugh. They swapped a few war stories, too—not the ones that kept them up at night, of course, but the pranks and close calls and hilarious fuckups that were safe to trot out to strangers. Even now, Steve noticed, they were still feeling each other out.

“So tell me something,” Bucky said, handing Steve another beer. “What made you join the Army after the whole—” he gestured vaguely at Steve’s enormous presence. “Embiggening.”

Steve laughed softly. “You want the official answer or the real one?”

It was Bucky’s turn to laugh. “I know it wasn’t because 9/11 made you angry. I was there, remember?”

“No,” Steve said. “It was because the war made me angry. I knew if it didn’t end fast, an entire generation of Americans would grow up thinking patriotism meant hating Muslims and foreigners, and I thought if I joined up, if I joined this—special team, I guess that part’s not classified anymore—I could keep that from happening.” He laughed bitterly. “That worked out great, didn’t it.”

A strange look came over Bucky’s face. He swallowed hard and opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better and stayed silent.

“What were you going to say?” Steve asked.

“Nothing,” Bucky said—and even after all these years, Steve could tell he was lying. _There’s so much he’ll never be able to tell you, Steve_. “I just—it really _is_ you in there, isn’t it,” he said finally.

“Yeah, I’m still me,” Steve said softly. He pointed toward himself and drew a vague circle. “Though I can’t get drunk anymore, which—sometimes I wish I could, you know. Escape for a bit.”

“Yeah.”

“I guess it’s good that I can’t,” Steve grinned, taking another sip of his beer. “Just have to learn how to cope with my shit in healthy ways.”

“I dunno, physical perfection and no hangovers sounds like a fair trade,” Bucky said. “Not that there was anything wrong with you before. You had a whole thing going on in high school you never recognized.”

“A whole thing, huh?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, blushing a little. “Like maybe you didn’t fit the mold but you were—people noticed you. I could tell.”

Steve grinned. “I did all right for myself in college,” he said, and Bucky laughed—that deep, genuine laugh that had made Steve practically glow at the coffee shop.

“Do you miss it?” Bucky asked. “The way you used to be?”

“Well, I don’t miss the asthma and there’s always going to be a part of me that feels safer being big,” Steve said, and then before he could stop, the rest came tumbling out: “But I can’t have kids anymore, and I really hate that.”

“What?”

“Another side effect. I’m not—I mean—all the equipment still works, it’s just that my DNA’s not compatible anymore,” he said. “When I was 19, I told myself it didn’t matter because I wasn’t into women anyway, but after my mom died—”

“It started to matter. She was your only blood relative.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, shrugging. He took a long pull from his beer. “God, I sound like such a caveman. It’s not like I wouldn’t love an adopted kid or anything. It’s just—”

“A loss.”

“A small one.”

“It’s not a contest,” Bucky said.

“No,” Steve said. “Can’t help but feel like it was rigged in my favor anyway, though. I have perfect vision and perfect hearing, I have twice as much lung capacity as any other living person, I can’t catch or transmit any diseases, and my injuries heal four times faster than anyone else’s. When you do the math, I’m probably the only one who came out of this war better off than they were before.”

“You really believe that?”

Steve shrugged. “Physically, anyway.”

“No, I mean, do you really believe you don’t deserve to be upset about what you lost?”

Steve exhaled heavily. “It’s not about what I deserve to feel, Buck,” he said. “It’s what I deserve to have. Some of the soldiers over there we killed—they were just teenagers with guns shoved into their hands by militants who threatened to murder their families if they didn’t fight. And some of my own men—” he shook his head. “I lost a kid. He was 19. Hadn’t been deployed long, maybe two months? Joined up because he couldn’t afford to go to college and the Army was the only one hiring in his town.”

“What was his name?” Bucky asked quietly.

“We called him Junior,” Steve said. “Sorry, the anniversary was a few days ago. I didn’t mean—"

Bucky gave him a hard, steady look. “There’s a group I go to at the VA. Veterans of Afghanistan. People like us. You could come with sometime,” Bucky offered. “If you want.”

Steve shook his head. “I’m not sure that’s a crowd I’d feel right about seeking pity from.”

“Oh, believe me, you won’t get any,” Bucky said wryly. “Empathy, maybe.”

Steve gave him a tight smile. Captain America wasn’t allowed to talk about how the war had hurt him yet.

“Well, we get together Thursday nights at seven if you change your mind.”

“Noted,” Steve said. “Mind if we change the subject now?”

Bucky laughed softly. “Sorry. I guess part of me is still trying to look after your bony ass.”

“Old habits die hard, huh?” Steve said, casting about for the most distracting alternative topic he could find. “I want to know more about this ‘whole thing’ I had going on in high school.”

Bucky blushed. “You’re going to make me spell it out for you, aren’t you.”

“Did we miss an opportunity?” Steve asked suddenly. _The_ opportunity, he couldn’t bring himself to say. “Are you—have you always been—?”

Bucky smiled. “Bi,” he said. “And yeah. I blew it big time.”

“Huh.”

“I was going to kiss you,” Bucky said. “My last night in New York, when we went up to the Brooklyn Bridge and I put my arm around you because you were cold. I was going to kiss you, and then—” he shook his head. “I don’t know. I chickened out. I started overthinking it because I liked girls, too, and I didn’t understand why I was into you, too—I didn’t know back then you could be both. Isn’t that dumb? New York City, 2001, and I still didn’t get it.”

“I had the biggest crush on you,” Steve admitted, suddenly feeling loose and careless. “Like, since middle school. Huge, all-consuming. It was—I was a mess.”

“Yeah, I knew,” Bucky said. “I could tell. That was what made me think maybe I—”

Steve laughed softly, and when his eyes returned to Bucky’s face, there was a quiet, intent look on his face that was both bewildering and unmistakable.

And before he realized what he was doing, Steve leaned in to kiss him.

Bucky met him halfway, delicate and curious, and then Steve reached forward to touch his cheek and the kiss deepened, darting tongues and nipping teeth, until they both gave into the need for breath and broke apart.

“Oh, man,” Steve said, touching his fingertips to his mouth in disbelief. “That was—not how I expected tonight to go.”

Bucky laughed softly and shook his head. “Me neither.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

Bucky thought for a moment. “I’m not sorry about it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Steve smiled. “Me neither.”

Then Bucky dropped his gaze to watch their fingers gently lace and unlace themselves through each other’s for a long minute.

Suddenly Steve felt overcome by a profound shyness he couldn't quite explain. He leaned forward and kissed Bucky gently on the cheek. “I think I should go,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said. “I didn’t mean—"

“It’s okay,” Steve said, then smiled and kissed the back of Bucky’s hand. “Walk me out?”

Steve held his hand all the way to the door, then paused to kiss him one more time. “I’m sorry—it’s just been a while since I’ve done this, and you seem—”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said, giving his hand a final squeeze before releasing it. “If you want some space on the trails in the morning, just let me know. There are other places I can run.”

“No, don’t do that,” Steve said. “I just—”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and laughed softly. “We both need to think. Today was—a lot.”

“Okay,” Steve said, hoping against hope that his relief wasn’t as obvious as it felt.

“Good night,” Bucky said, kissing him chastely on the cheek as he opened the door. “We’re good, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “We’re good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love all your comments. 
> 
> You can also yell at me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An answer to an old question

As it turned out, he didn’t need to worry about crossing paths with Bucky in the park, because an out-of-season tropical storm moving up the Atlantic coast chose that week to dump five straight days of rain on Washington.

Perhaps it was for the best. He needed the mind-numbing dullness of running mile after mile on the treadmill in SHIELD’s gym, staring at a point on the featureless cinderblock wall just below a television tuned to cable news. He played the kiss over and over in his mind, parsing the meaning of it, the significance of it. How does a dream come true, just like that? It wasn’t Bucky he was skeptical of—it was fate itself for perpetuating such an audacious coincidence.

And he hadn’t been lying to Bucky—it _had_ been a while. His constant deployments had left him single for more than a decade, and none of the handful of men he’d fucked along the way had been anything more than one-night stands and lost weekends.

But this thing with Bucky—whatever this was or could be—was entirely different. How much of this was just nostalgia? Was he attracted to the boy he’d once been or the man he’d become? Would he ever truly be able to know the man Bucky had become? He would never be able to speak of what he’d done to anyone who wasn’t cleared—no matter how serious their relationship became, no matter even if they married. Bucky made him feel something he hadn’t felt in years, but 15 years of Bucky’s life would forever be walled off from him, and he wasn’t sure he had it in him anymore to deal with that.

He was just so fucking sick of secrets.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unfortunately, not even work gave him an escape from that.

The Christine Everhart story would not go away: All anyone could talk about was the possibility of a secret American assassination program to ensure that the future governments of Iraq and Afghanistan would remain friendly—subservient—to the coalition nations currently fighting there. (Never mind, Steve longed to point out, that the assassinations were having precisely the opposite effect.)

The rumors had ballooned into absurdity since then—that it was a joint effort between the United States and European Union to bracket Iran for control of the Persian Gulf, that it was a plot to frame Russia and get them expelled from the UN Security Council, that Russia was involved and had made a deal with the West to create a global oil cartel that would subsume OPEC, that it wasn’t the Americans at all, but a plot between Russia and Iran to throw the American war effort into disarray.

He spent the entire week on camera, doing the rounds of nearly every cable news show Maria could get him on, beginning with the Sunday morning talk shows.

Steve had learned over the years how to keep a straight face on TV, no matter how ridiculous the claim, no matter how much the person speaking should know better, but his discipline was beginning to fray more and more with each passing day.

On Friday afternoon, he broke. It was his fourth appearance of the day and his twelfth or thirteenth that week, and he could not even remember which show—or network—he was on. All he knew was that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was calling for an investigation into the Venezuelans’ role in the assassinations, and before Steve could stop himself, he giggled.

In uniform.

On live TV.

At a senator.

It was just a quick chuckle and he pulled himself together almost immediately for the rest of the segment, but the damage was done. Not a second after the network cut to commercial, Steve felt his phone buzz indignantly in his jacket pocket.

“I know, I know,” he said to Maria as he disentangled himself from his mic and handed it to the production assistant. “I lost it. I’m sorry.”

“What the hell is the matter with you, Steve?” Maria shouted. “Secretary Pierce is going to bite my fucking head off for this. You cannot laugh at a senator when you’re wearing that uniform. Pull your shit together.”

Steve bit back the snarky retort he wanted to make and let Maria’s temper blow itself out. As much of a pain in the ass the Everhart story was to him, it was three times as thorny for her. As SHIELD’s press secretary, she was fielding far harder, smarter questions than he was from seasoned beat reporters in the briefing room twice a day and taking calls all day and night about it, to boot.

Finally, Maria’s rant subsided and she apologized.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unprofessional of me.”

“I can take it,” Steve said gently. “I fucked up.”

“Did Senator Stern really just accuse Venezuela of being involved in all this?”

“I’m telling you, Maria, if you’d been here, you’d have lost it, too.”

Whether she would have laughed on TV or not, she laughed now, and Steve felt his shoulders release a few ticks in response. He knew it would take a much bigger fuckup than that to get fired, and God knew the senator deserved to be laughed at for his stupidity, but he liked Maria, and respected her. He didn’t like letting her down.

“I’m on _Hardball_ tonight at 9, right?” Steve asked. “I’ll get my shit together—I promise.”

“No, I’ll do it myself,” Maria said. “You’re loopy. Sharon can do the weekend shows. Take the weekend and we’ll regroup on Monday.”

“Maria, I can—”

“I’m ordering you to take a weekend off, Rogers,” Maria said sternly. “So do it.” 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back at home, he showered and changed and looked at his phone half a dozen times before opening a blank text to Bucky—only to see three pulsing dots when he did.

 _I’d have laughed at him too_ , Bucky typed. Then, after a very long pause, while Steve was still struggling to figure out how to respond, he added: _Drink?_

Steve flushed and grinned despite himself. _Throw in dinner and it’s a deal._

They met at a Thai restaurant not far from Steve’s apartment. It was a good place to take people you wanted to have an actual conversation with—the food was excellent, the drinks were good, the atmosphere was quirky enough to be charming but not trendy enough to draw a crowd, the lighting just dim enough to foil would-be paparazzi. Natasha called it a perfect first-date restaurant, and she wasn’t wrong.

Steve wasn’t sure this was a date—he wasn’t sure what anything with Bucky was right now—but it wasn’t too loud and he went there often enough to be able to request a table in the back corner, where they’d both be most comfortable, and there was nothing on the menu that Bucky would need a fork and knife for. (He wasn’t sure if the last thing was a consideration he should presume to make, but he figured it couldn’t hurt.)

Steve was already seated when Bucky arrived. He stayed seated as he watched through the plate-glass window as Bucky approached from the sidewalk, checked his phone and then the name on the sign, and then opened the door. He was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans and his hair was down again, and Steve enjoyed watching him chat easily with the hostess, marveling at how easily he charmed her. When she turned to point towards his table, she was still smiling at whatever he’d said.

But the best part, Steve thought, was seeing Bucky’s face light up when he saw him. His face broke into a grin and he lifted his chin as he thanked the hostess and began to work his way through the restaurant to the back.

Steve stood as he approached, grateful that the dim light would obscure the blush he could feel creeping across his face. He held out his hands a little and Bucky accepted the hug, and as Steve put his arms around him he impulsively dropped a little kiss on his cheek too. He surprised Bucky with that, he could tell, but then he laughed a little and squeezed Steve’s hand as they drew apart, and Steve knew the surprise had been a welcome one.

“Feeling a little more settled now?” Bucky ventured after the waitress brought their drinks.

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Steve said, his blush renewing as he spoke. “I just know it’s been a shitty week and I wanted to see you.”

Bucky smiled. “That’s good enough for me,” he said.

Steve smiled in return. “Good,” he said. “The whole world saw how my week went. Tell me about yours.”

To Steve’s surprise, there was a lot Bucky was able to talk about without actually disclosing what he did. He deftly sidestepped questions about his actual duties with vague descriptions and professions of dullness, but he talked freely about his unnamed coworkers, the petty politics that governed the office coffee maker, the irritating habit his boss had of dropping some last-minute request on his desk at the end of the day.

It was strange, knowing Bucky was lying to him without Bucky knowing that he knew, and yet Natasha had screwed him over, because even though he knew, he couldn’t tell Bucky that he did. It was illegal to breach a CIA officer’s cover; not only would revealing what he knew cost him his job, but Bucky’s and Natasha’s, too. He understood she was doing it to protect him, but in characteristic fashion, Natasha had ensured the secrecy of her disclosure by putting a gun to the head of everyone involved.

So Steve did what he did every time he had to compartmentalize information—he shoved it into a tiny lockbox in his mind and focused on what was in front of him right now.

And that—that was a stunningly handsome old friend with sweet crinkles at the corner of his eyes that Steve wanted nothing more than to kiss and a smile that he could not help but return. Steve loved how much he still recognized in him—his taste for spicy food, his habit of always ordering something he’d never tried before, his insistence on dessert. Steve was still a pad-thai-and-fork kind of guy, and he endured Bucky’s affectionate ribbing over that with yet another blush that had nothing to do with embarrassment.

His unease began to fade. He still wasn’t sure what stroke of luck had placed Bucky in his path the way it had, or how he was going to cope with the fact that Bucky had secrets even he couldn’t know, but those two things seemed to matter less and less the longer they were together.

They finished their dinner and Steve won the argument for the bill, and then they went out into the cool, clear night. The last of the rain had finally cleared away that afternoon, and even the damp was beginning to fade, and by unspoken agreement they began to walk. They were headed toward Steve’s apartment and they both knew it, and when they finally arrived at the building, they stopped and Steve lightly touched Bucky’s hip.

“Nightcap?” he asked, wondering if the pounding of his heart was audible to anyone else, and Bucky smiled.

Upstairs, he poured them both a couple of fingers of scotch and as Bucky settled on the sofa, Steve put on some music. His place was a little bigger and much older than Bucky’s, the prewar grandeur giving it an air of luxury it didn’t deserve. He’d thought about using his back combat pay to fix it up, but he’d decided to buy the cabin in the Catskills instead, and now, as he was approaching the end of his hitch in Washington, he knew he’d made the right call.

Once he got the music playing, he turned around shyly and leaned against the bookcase, passing his glass back and forth between his hands.

“Come,” Bucky said, nodding at the cushion beside him. “Sit.”

Steve laughed softly and complied, sitting sideways to face him. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Bucky said, meeting his eyes with a small, amused smile. “Let’s try this again.” He put his scotch on the coffee table and then took Steve’s glass and did the same. Then he placed his hand on Steve’s cheek and leaned forward to kiss him.

Steve’s nerves evaporated and he responded hungrily. His hand went first to caress Bucky’s face and then slid down toward the small of his back, letting his fingertips lightly tease their way under his t-shirt to rest against his skin. Bucky made a soft, delicious hissing sound when he did, and kissed Steve harder, letting a blunt fingernail leave a sizzling trail of sensation along the tender shell of his ear.

Steve ran his hand up and down the curved divot of Bucky’s spine, feeling the muscles of his back ripple and contract as he moved and breathed, mapping contours of his burns and shrapnel wounds.

“Tell me if there’s anything I shouldn’t touch,” he murmured as his thumb skirted the outer edge of his stump. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Nothing hurts right now,” Bucky said, lightly brushing his nose against Steve’s. “I feel great.”

“Good,” Steve said, redoubling his kiss and moving his hand around through the field of scar tissue along Bucky’s side to his chest, his thumb tracing circles around his nipple. “You feel pretty great to me, too.”

Bucky laughed softly against Steve’s lips, then nosed his face away so he could nibble on Steve’s earlobe.

Pleasure poured through him like good wine, warming him from the inside out, and he felt his cock begin to push insistently against the fly of his jeans, and he had never wanted anyone in his life as much as he wanted this man.

And then, no sooner had that thought formed, it was replaced by another, just as clear, just as insistent: He could not lie to Bucky about what he knew. He could not do this and lie to him at the same time. Anyone else, maybe, but not Bucky. Not even now, with 20 years and half a lifetime between them, he could not lie.

“This is a bad idea,” Steve said, suddenly drawing back and standing up. “Buck, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I—”

“I think you do,” Bucky said, glancing at the growing bulge in Steve’s jeans. “I think we both know exactly what we want right now.”

“My life is—” Steve said, shaking his head and walking over to the window. “We can’t just pick up where we left off, you know? It’s been almost 20 years and our lives have changed so much. But I see you, and all of a sudden I’m 16 again—”

“Me too,” Bucky said. “Despite everything.”

Steve looked out onto the city again for a long minute. “I live in a fishbowl,” he said finally, not able to bring himself to turn around to face Bucky. “It’s a bad place to figure this kind of thing out. You saw what happened at the coffee shop.”

In the reflection of the window, he saw Bucky stand and walk up behind him. Bucky threaded his arm around Steve’s waist and rested his head on Steve’s shoulder.

“There’s no one else here, Stevie,” he said. “It’s just you and me and a question we’ve wanted to ask each other for more than 20 years.”

Steve shook his head and turned to face Bucky, gently peeling his hand away as he did. “The worst day of my life—well the second-worst day of my life—was waking up to see my entire life story on the cover of the _New York Bulletin_ ,” Steve said. “I don’t want that to happen to you.”

Bucky nodded and stepped away to retrieve his drink. He didn’t face Steve when he spoke again. “I take it you saw my file?”

“I didn’t ask to see it,” Steve said quickly. “It was put in front of me. Bucky, I have Top Secret clearance and it was entirely redacted, even for me.”

“It’s codeword classified,” Bucky said. “President Ellis doesn’t even have clearance for it.”

Steve swallowed hard. “I’m not going to ask you what you did,” he said. “But if this goes anywhere—if _we_ go anywhere—some reporter will file a Freedom of Information Act request on you. And when they see a file as long as yours, as redacted as yours—”

“Let them,” Bucky said.

Steve let out a surprised laugh. “What?”

“You know about Provision 13?”

Steve nodded. Provision 13 allowed the government to create false records to protect a national security operation.

“Any civilian who files a FoIA request won’t see the same file you did,” Bucky said quietly. “They’ll see a respectable military combat career and an unspeakably dull State Department employee dossier, and nothing more.”

“Jesus.”

“You don’t need to protect me, Steve. As long as you don’t blow my cover, I can handle the rest, okay?”

“Just tell me one thing, if you can,” Steve said.

“I probably can’t,” Bucky said, matter-of-factly.

“How much of what you’ve told me already is a lie?”

Bucky finished his scotch and set his glass down. “Zero percent that has to do with my feelings for you,” he said. “Here’s the deal. From now on, if there’s something I can’t talk about, I’ll tell you. If we’re with other people, I might lie in front of them, but I’ll never lie to you in private, okay? That’s the deal.” He shrugged. “It’s the only deal.”

Steve nodded, feeling the decision make itself for him. “Okay.”

Bucky laughed and glanced at the ceiling. “Well, I’ve killed the mood entirely, haven’t I.”

Steve stepped forward and took Bucky’s hand in his, pulling him close. “It’s not fair,” he said, kissing Bucky’s forehead. “After all this time apart, I can’t even know where you were.”

“I’m here now,” Bucky said, raising his hand to stroke the line of Steve’s cheek. “That’s all that matters.” He brushed his thumb across Steve’s lips, then leaned in to kiss him again. As he did, he let his hand fall to Steve’s shoulder, slide flat across the swell of his left pec, coming to rest on the placket of his shirt, where he began to thumb his buttons open one by one.

Steve closed his eyes for a minute, letting Bucky’s touch drain his worry away, letting the _rightness_ of the moment, the _miracle_ of it settle into its place.

“All right,” he murmured, sliding his hands around Bucky’s back, pulling him hard against his own body as they kissed. He could feel Bucky’s heart pounding against his own chest, Bucky’s cock growing hard against the divot of his pelvis while his own pressed hard alongside it.

He felt Bucky smile against his mouth and let out a breathy little laugh before kissing him again.

“Come here,” Bucky said, pressing his forehead against Steve’s, his fingers sliding around into the back of Steve’s waistband, cupping his ass to haul him closer, grinding against the flat plane of Steve’s belly.

Steve responded with hard, hungry kisses, years of pent-up desire fizzing through every nerve of his body. “I want to touch you,” he said, unbuttoning Bucky’s jeans and sliding his hand down the front of his boxer briefs.

“Don’t stop there,” Bucky said, working his underwear down and then turning his attention to Steve’s own jeans. “Help me get your shorts down,” he murmured, biting Steve’s lower lip, and Steve did, easing the elastic over his erection, already wet with need. He gathered both Bucky’s cock and his own into his hand and began to stroke them together as they kissed, slicking them both with his precome.

“Did you already—?” Bucky asked.

“No,” Steve said, darting around to nibble his ear. “It’s the serum. Makes me—juicy.”

“Juicy,” Bucky laughed softly. “That’s so fucking—”

“Convenient?”

“I was going to say hot,” Bucky said, planting soft, sucking kisses to Steve’s neck. “But that, too.”

After a while they grew too distracted to kiss. Bucky draped his arm around Steve’s neck and leaned hard against him, watching as Steve slowly jerked them both off.

“Your hands are so fucking huge now,” Bucky murmured, dropping a sideways kiss on Steve’s chin.

“Just my hands?” Steve asked playfully, grinning at how breathy his own voice had become.

“You always had a big dick,” Bucky said, just as breathless. “I was always so fucking jealous of it.”

“I love your cock,” Steve said, letting his own go and concentrating solely on Bucky’s. “You have no idea how much I thought about it back in the day, how much I wanted to do this to it.”

“Don’t ever stop,” Bucky groaned, then lightly bit Steve’s neck. “Oh, fuck, that’s good.”

“I like watching you melt,” Steve said.

“God, I’d fucking return the favor if I had my other hand,” Bucky said, tightening his hold around Steve’s shoulder. “But I’m gonna fall down if I let go.”

“I’ve got you,” Steve said, kissing his temple. “Just hold on.” 

Steve grinned as Bucky’s breath began to hitch and his hips began to buck. He showered little kisses on his face as he gave into his pleasure, his urgent moaning all the stimulation Steve needed to stay hard as he brought Bucky to his orgasm, spattering their bellies and spilling over his hand as Bucky sighed and sagged beside him.

“Oh, fuck, Stevie,” Bucky said after a long, boneless minute. “That was fucking fantastic.”

“I love it when you say ‘fuck,’” Steve said, nuzzling the top of his head, earning a small, tired laugh in response.

Then, suddenly, Bucky straightened up, laid a fat, sloppy kiss on Steve’s mouth and dropped to his knees in front of him. “You have no idea how much I wanted to do _this_ ,” he said, taking Steve’s cock into his mouth.

Steve groaned with pleasure as he felt Bucky’s lips close around his shaft. “Oh god, Buck,” he said. “That feels amazing.”

Bucky hummed in response and the vibration of his voice shattered through Steve, forcing a shaky, gasping moan from his lungs. He carded his fingers through Bucky’s hair to keep his knees from buckling with pleasure; the sensation was just enough to distract him from the ruin Bucky was making of him with his tongue. 

Steve wanted to make it last, but when Bucky gathered his balls into his hand and began to play with them, it was all over.

“Bucky, I’m gonna—” he started, but Bucky just glanced up at him with a wicked smile in his eyes and kept going until Steve came, pumping hard as he felt Bucky swallow around him.

“Oh God,” Steve said finally, caressing Bucky’s cheek as he slid free. “You have no idea how many teenage prayers you just answered.”

Bucky laughed softly and rocked back on his heels as he wiped his mouth and grinned. Steve offered him a hand to help him up, and as he did, he pressed a long, hard kiss to Bucky’s lips.

“Worth the wait?” Steve asked, grinning.

“Oh yeah,” Bucky said. He turned to grab Steve’s forgotten scotch from the coffee table and took a sip, then handed the glass to him. “Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers,” Steve said, and took a sip of his own.

Bucky kissed him then, long and slow and sweet, and then he gingerly tucked himself back into his underwear and his jeans and gave Steve an apologetic smile.

“I should go,” he said softly.

“You don’t have to,” Steve said.

“I know, and I don’t want to,” Bucky said, nodding at the window. Steve followed his gaze down to the street, where a gray SUV he didn’t recognize was parked below. So the press _had_ gotten wind of his date. “But you have paparazzi and I’ve probably been here too long as it is. I don’t want you to have to make a statement until there’s something to make a statement about.”

“You mean Captain America getting blown by his high school sweetheart isn’t news?” Steve said slyly, leaning in for one more kiss before pulling his own pants up. “Come on. I’ll show you how to avoid the front door.”

They snuggled in the elevator as it carried them to the basement. Steve led him past the laundry room and a row of dusty, vaguely ominous storage closets until they reached a metal door that gave out onto the alley behind the building.

“You’ll have to go past the dumpsters to get to the next street, so it’s not exactly the scenic route, but it might spare you some heartburn,” Steve said as he opened the door.

“I don’t mind,” Bucky said, kissing him one last time. “Talk soon?”

“Is tomorrow too soon?” Steve asked, lightly swatting his bottom. “Text me to let me know you got home safe?”

Bucky laughed softly and rolled his eyes. “Sure,” he said, blowing Steve a kiss as he turned to head out. “See you in my dreams.”

Steve grinned. “You know it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love all your comments. 
> 
> You can also yell at me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's weird.

As the month of April rolled on, the Afghanistan assassinations continued to give the SHIELD public affairs office heartburn, mostly in the person of Senator Stern, who had the maddening ability to make even the most ridiculous allegations sound reasonable. Now China was involved. Now North Korea. Now the Saudis. Now Israel.

“ _Someone_ is trying to delegitimize our authority in Afghanistan, and I think we owe it to the American people to find out,” said Stern. “If the U.S. military _isn’t_ behind this, then who is?”

Steve kept his face straight. “Senator, the United States military does not carry out political assassinations. It never has and it never will.”

“And yet they happened, Captain,” Stern shot back. “You’re telling me the strongest military in the world can’t keep its allies safe?”

Steve was about to open his mouth to protest the insult, but the producer had already cut his mic. His time was up.

“Lots of questions left unanswered, it’s clear,” the anchor interjected. “Gentlemen, we’ll have to leave it there. After the commercial, we’ve got Congresswoman Ester Rodriguez from Colorado and Dr. Anu Gunasekaran from the FDA discussing the new federal medical marijuana bill.”

Steve’s back was still rigid with rage by the time he’d covered the hundred yards between the SHIELD satellite studio and the public affairs office suite. He stormed in and went straight to Maria’s door.

“What the hell is wrong with Stern?” Steve groused. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was doing this just to get back at me for laughing at him.”

Maria sighed and sat back in her chair. “Nah,” she said. “Stern doesn’t have enough shame to feel embarrassed about that. If you ask me, I think he’s getting ready to run for president. We’re a year out from the primaries and no one’s stood up to challenge Ellis on reelection yet. I think he’s decided this is his chance.”

“So, what, he’s just going on TV to trash Ellis’ legacy left and right till no one knows what to believe anymore?” Steve asked, feeling blood pounding in his temples. The memory of Junior’s shattered head and collapsed body rose unbidden suddenly, the soft, gulping whimper Peggy made when she spit a piece of brain away that had come to cling against her lip, and the teenager outside of Jalalabad who—

“Does he not have an iota of respect for the men and women who have given their lives for this? For the civilians whose lives have been destroyed? Disagree with the war all you want, but treating it like a _joke_ —”

Maria shrugged. “That’s politics,” she said wearily. “I’m not saying he believes what he’s saying—but if you ask me, I think his crazy’s a lot more calculated than it sounds.”

Steve leaned against the door and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I hate this fucking town,” he said.

“Steve,” Maria said, not unkindly. “I know this is hard. I know this isn’t what you ever wanted to do. But you’ve only got a few more months, okay? Suck it up and do your duty. Don’t let Senator Stern get the better of you.”

“Are you telling me that as my boss or my friend?” he asked.

“Both,” Maria said stonily. “Steve, please don’t blow it now.”

“I’ll behave, I promise,” Steve said.

“By the way, how are things going with the new guy?” Maria asked then, too suddenly and falsely casual to be an accident.

“As my boss or my friend?”

“Both,” Maria said.

“Why? Did Darcy come across something online?”

“No. Not a peep,” Maria said. “That’s why I’m checking.”

“Well, we’re doing great, thank you for asking, and I guess that means we’re officially too boring for the gossip rags,” Steve said, levering up from the doorway and straightening his uniform. “Count your blessings I’m not Tony Stark.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I like seeing you on TV,” Bucky said, handing him a glass of bourbon.

They’d come back to his place after dinner and a whole lot of good wine at a fashionable new tapas place near Capitol Hill. It was more visible than the usual kinds of places they gravitated toward, but one of the few perks of his fame was being able to snag a reservation anywhere in town and he’d had a silly notion to show off, so El Sol it was.

It hadn’t gone too badly, either—they’d gotten a table in the back and he’d only had to politely decline two selfie requests—so he counted it as a win. Still, Steve had spotted a photographer out on the sidewalk as they’d left, so he was internally bracing for the long-overdue burst of speculation over Washington’s most eligible bachelor.

But since there was nothing he could do about it now, he pushed it aside. They were back at Bucky’s place now, having a drink that was just an excuse for what came next—Bucky snuggling in close to him on the sofa and dropping a kiss on Steve’s ear as he set his untouched drink aside.

It had been four weeks since they’d run into each other at Rock Creek Park, and they had been taking things slow, ending their nights with a little kissing or maybe a mostly-clothed blow job, but not much more. Although Steve had seen him without his shirt on in the photograph, Bucky seemed shy about undressing in person, so Steve was letting him set the pace. But something about Bucky’s tone of voice made Steve realize he was ready to speed things up a little, and the idea made him tighten up in a fun way.

“You do?” Steve asked, putting his own drink aside and turning to face him. “What do you like about it?”

“I like to see how handsome you are,” Bucky said, kissing his way down Steve’s jaw. “I like to see how commanding you are. I like to see how masterfully you put those spineless politicians in their place.” He straddled Steve’s lap and kissed him hard on the mouth. “I like to think about sucking your dick just below the screen while you do it,” he said, biting Steve’s lip. “I like to know you’re mine.”

“Am I?” Steve said, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s back and kissing him hard. “I like the sound of that.”

“I like the feel of that,” Bucky said, grinning against Steve’s mouth and grinding a little against Steve’s rapidly rising erection. Steve laughed and hauled him in closer before maneuvering him around onto his back on the sofa and climbed on top of him. It was a big sofa, soft and deep, and Steve was able to come up on knees and elbows to hover over him—or deliciously trap him, as the case was.

“Taking advantage of me, Rogers?” Bucky teased, pretending to struggle beneath him.

Steve laughed and glanced down at the space between them. “Oh, believe me, you could end things really quick with your knee right now if you wanted to,” he said, dropping a sloppy kiss on Bucky’s mouth. “But if you don’t like this we can do something else.”

“Oh no,” Bucky said, running his hand down Steve’s side and working it under the waistband of his jeans as he pulled Steve down on top of him. “I’m very happy with this arrangement.”

“Then so am I,” Steve said, and kissed him again.

They made out like teenagers, kissing and sucking and tasting and pushing clothes out of the way in search of skin. They kicked off their shoes and tugged off their shirts and wriggled out of their jeans until they were facing each other, flushed and breathless and hard.

Steve’s eyes drifted involuntarily to Bucky’s scars first, that arm he wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to missing, before moving on to the beautifully carved stomach and chest, stronger on the right side, to his magnificent shoulder and sculpted arm, his trim waist and muscled thighs—the scars on his left side trailing down his left hip and thigh—

“Come,” Bucky said huskily, taking Steve’s hand and walking him into the bedroom. “More room to play in here.”

“What do you like to play with?” Steve asked, the word sending a jolt of _want_ though his body.

“Oh, a few things,” Bucky said archly, bending rather ostentatiously to open the drawer of his bedside table. Steve put a possessive hand on his ass as he did, and Bucky wiggled it a little in response. “I’m not, like, a dungeon guy, but this little dude’s a lot of fun." He tossed a bottle of lube and a softly sculpted purple butt plug onto the bedspread. “You want to help me put it in?” he said coyly over his shoulder.

“Fuck, yes,” Steve growled softly, bending over onto the bed and using his foot to nudge Bucky’s feet apart to expose his hole. Christ, this was beautiful. He squeezed a good dollop of lube into the crease of Bucky’s ass and used his hand to work it up and into his hole, his own cock throbbing as his finger touched the pulsing ring of muscle. Then he slicked up the toy with what was left on his hand, and touched the tip of the plug to Bucky's skin. “Ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” Bucky gasped, turning his head back to watch Steve as he slowly began to ease the plug in.

Bucky groaned with pleasure and curled his fingers into the bedspread, and began to rock his hips back and forth as Steve settled the plug into place. “Fuck, that feels good,” he mumbled. “I’m so fucking hard right now.”

“You want me to do something about that for you?” Steve asked, bending over Bucky’s back to nibble his ear and rub his cock against Bucky’s thigh, pushing the tip against the back of his balls. 

“Please,” Bucky begged.

“Turn over,” Steve said, giving Bucky’s ass a commanding squeeze. “Sit up.”

Bucky did as he was bade and sat on the edge of the bed, angling his hips to put maximum pressure on the plug and spreading his legs so Steve could kneel between them and take him into his mouth. He groaned as Steve closed his lips around him and began to suck.

Bucky tasted salty and rich, a little musky from whatever soap he used, a little funky from the day’s sweat. He was pushing himself urgently against the roof of Steve’s mouth, fucking Steve’s mouth as much as Steve was sucking him. Bucky began to moan and it was the sexiest goddamn sound Steve had ever heard. He wrapped his hand around his own cock, already slick with precome and began to stroke himself as he sucked Bucky off, bringing them both into the same rhythm.

“Oh God, Steve,” Bucky gasped, leaning forward and curling his fingers into Steve’s hair, hips jerking with abandon. “Fuck, this is good. Oh, fuck—yes—fuck—Steve—fuck—I’m gonna—I’m gonna—fuck—"

His words fell apart as he flooded Steve’s mouth with cum, and he swallowed greedily, pumping himself harder and harder. 

“Here,” Bucky said, easing himself out of Steve’s mouth and sitting back. “Let me watch you.”

Steve held onto Bucky’s knee for balance and rocked back on his heels and locked eyes with him, gazing blearily at him with his mouth half-open, gasping and moaning as he brought himself close. Bucky was watching him with a lazy little smile of delight, rubbing the side of his foot along Steve’s calf until he came with a wordless cry, pumping into his hand.

“Oh Jesus,” Steve sighed, leaning against Bucky’s knee. Bucky reached forward to ruffle his hair and caress his cheek before twisting a little to withdraw the plug and toss it into the laundry hamper in the corner.

“That was really hot, Stevie,” he said softly. “Watching you make yourself come. I don’t think I could ever get sick of that.”

“Happy to oblige,” Steve said breathlessly, rising to join Bucky on the bed and pressing a kiss to his shoulder. The injured one, he realized belatedly as Bucky glanced down.

“Does it bother you?” he asked.

“It bothers me that it makes your life harder,” Steve said. “It’s not a turn-off, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Prosthetics suck when you have an amputation this high,” he said. “Army gave me one, and it was okay, I guess, but it was just more trouble than it was worth.”

“You don’t need to explain.”

“But I want to,” Bucky said. “I want you to know that about me.”

“What else do you want me to know about you?” Steve asked, kissing the shoulder again.

“Everything,” Bucky said, a little wistfully.

“I looked at your Instagram,” Steve said. “Is that weird?”

“No,” Bucky said, laughing softly. “Enjoy my boring civilian life?”

“You really shoot that well one-handed?”

“I do,” Bucky said, preening a little. “Buddy of mine has a range out in Maryland. Does stuff with wounded vets, helps them get their confidence back,” he said. “You spend a year or five in a place where it’s kill or be killed, day in and day out, you feel really vulnerable if you can’t shoot as well as you used to.” He shrugged and shook his head. “Like, I don’t want to be that asshole who's so scared of the world that he has to pack his weapon to go to the McDonald’s drive-thru, but going to the range on a bad day to clear your head? Hells yeah.”

“I box,” Steve said. “Sometimes it just feels good to punch things.”

“You were always that way,” Bucky teased. “I swear to God, I got more practice in hand-to-hand combat dragging your ass out of fights at school than I did at West Point.”

Steve laughed and shook his head. “Wouldn’t have made it to adulthood without ya, Buck.”

Bucky leaned against Steve and kissed his shoulder. “I don’t know if this is way too soon or way overdue, depending on how you look at it, but like, I’m really glad I found you again. It—I don’t mean to scare you off or anything, but the past few weeks have been good, right? They’ve been good.”

“They’ve been really good,” Steve said. “High-school-me’s dream come true.”

“And what about grownup-you?”

Steve laughed softly and nodded. “He’s pretty happy about this too.”

“Would it freak you out if I said I love you?” Bucky asked cautiously. “Because I’m pretty sure I have since I was probably 15 years old?”

“No,” Steve said hoarsely. “I think I have too.” He felt his eyes sting a little and laughed again, ruffling Bucky’s hair and playfully pushing him away. “Tryin’ to make me cry or something?”

Bucky laughed softly and half-turned to face him so he could hug him. “Next time sit on my right side, huh?” he said, kissing Steve’s shoulder.

“You got it,” Steve said, kissing his forehead and crawling around to Bucky’s other side. The new spot gave him a good view of Bucky’s portrait, and he found it as hauntingly beautiful as he had before. Then it reminded him of the photographer he’d seen earlier.

“Not to ruin the moment, I spotted some paparazzi at the restaurant as we were leaving.”

Bucky nodded. “I saw him,” he said. “Didn’t see his face, though.”

“So that thing we talked about might happen soon,” Steve said. “Darcy says it’ll probably just be like, a thing for a week and then the internet will move on to something else, but, y’know. It’s a possibility people will say some ugly things. Jealous fans, trolls, that sort of thing.”

Bucky nodded and shrugged. “Well, bring it on, I guess,” he said. “Or get it over with, at least. Set up a photo op if you have to.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said.

“Don’t be,” Bucky said. “I have enough secrets in my life as it is. I don’t want to be one for you.”

Steve started to protest again—it was so unfair—but stopped when he recognized the determination in Bucky’s eyes. “Your fake record is airtight?” he asked instead.

“Airtight,” Bucky said. He got off the bed and went into the closet, where he dragged out a heavy-looking document safe and quickly thumbed through the combination. “Here. You should probably know what’s in it.”

He handed Steve a much thinner dossier that said exactly what Bucky said it would: Senior CMS security specialist at State—which Steve was fairly certain didn’t mean anything at all—following 15 years of meritorious service in the Army, most recently with the 107th, deployed three times to Afghanistan, recipient of a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, and no one left alive to refute it because they’d all been killed by that IED.

“Is that how you really got hurt?” Steve asked quietly when he was done. “The IED?”

Bucky nodded. “That part’s true.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Bucky said, closing the file and pushing it away. “Honestly, I’m sorry about all of it.”

“What’s the Bronze Star for?”

Bucky gave Steve a tight smile and a shrug. “No comment.”

“Ah.”

Bucky nodded. “Sorry.”

“Then tell me something you _can_ tell me.”

“I want you to spend the night, but I have really bad nightmares and I’m not ready for you to see that yet,” he said. “That’s why I haven’t asked.”

“I thought you might,” Steve said. 

“I’m working on it, though,” Bucky said. “It’s part of why I go to group. It’s something I want. I want you to know that. I don’t want you to think I don’t want more.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “I’ll wait till you’re ready.”

“I’m sorry I’m so fucked up,” Bucky said.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Steve said. “It’s a part of you and I love you. So whatever you need to do, we’ll do. That’s all there is to it.”

Bucky was quiet for a moment. “You’re a good man, Steve.”

“So are you.”

Bucky exhaled softly and smiled. “Trying to be.”

Steve pulled him close and kissed him on the side of the head. “One of these days you’ll believe it,” he said. “And I’ll be here when you do.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Good morning, Cap,” Darcy said, knocking on Steve’s door frame as she breezed in with the weekend social media engagement report. “Happy to report that all remains quiet on the social media front, aside from the usual clowns.”

“Nothing, uh, personal, then?” Steve asked. “I mean, I saw a photographer this weekend. I was—on a date.”

“Nope,” Darcy said, popping the ‘p.’ “And I’ve started monitoring Mr. Barnes’ accounts too—not to be creepy, Steve, so chill—but just so you’ll know if there’s something you or he will need to respond to. That’s all.” She dropped the report on his desk and turned it around so it was facing him. On the front page was a printout of Bucky’s latest Instagram post—a copy of the photo that hung in his bedroom. “Way to go, by the way,” she said, winking. “He’s a hottie.”

“He posted that?” Steve asked.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” she asked, leaning over the desk to double-check. “Yeah, it’s sweet. He’s thanking the photographer.”

_Very belatedly wanted to share my appreciation for this portrait by @PeterParkerPhoto, who came all the way down from New York last year to Walter Reed. Acceptance is a neverending journey but I finally got the courage to hang it up in my home a few weeks ago with the help of someone who means a lot to me. Thank you for helping me see myself like this and be proud of everything I’ve survived._

Steve had to salute him for finding a way to get ahead of the story on his own. Bucky had picked up thousands of followers since posting the selfie in the coffee shop—Darcy said they were probably superfans who followed everyone Steve knew in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him, which Steve found gross but which Darcy seemed to think was normal—and the comments Darcy highlighted were positively glowing, if occasionally condescending in their praise.

With a single photo, Bucky had effectively weaponized Steve’s fans in his favor. No matter what kind of stories or speculation came out, they'd have an army on their side. 

Steve began to understand why he was working for the CIA.

Just then, his phone rang, flashing Natasha’s extension.

“Is this about Bucky?” he asked.

“Is it weird that after a month of dating, the only evidence of your relationship with Bucky seems to be two fleeting references on his Instagram account? I couldn’t even find any photos of you two at the coffee shop. Nobody posted them anywhere.”

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” Steve said. “I’m just the chorus girl, remember?”

“I was trying to track down that photographer you saw on Saturday night, and there’s nothing, anywhere. Not just of you, but nothing of anyone at El Sol that night. Are you sure that was a journalist?”

“How the hell should I know?” Steve asked. “I was just trying to pay the valet and get Bucky into the car before he got too close. Maybe he got a bad shot. Maybe he grew a conscience. I don't know, and I don't care.”

“Steve, when have the paparazzi ever stopped to say, ‘On second thought, maybe I’ll allow this guy the dignity of conducting his private life in private?’”

“So what, then?”

“I don’t know,” Natasha said. “It’s weird.”

“What am I supposed to do with _it’s weird_?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Natasha said. “I’ll look into it. Just—act normal in the meantime. And Steve, don’t tell him about this yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m worried it has something to do with all that black magic marker scribbled all over his file,” Natasha said flatly. “And if that’s the case, and he decides to Nancy Drew this himself, he might kick a hornet’s nest he’s not prepared to deal with.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love all your comments. 
> 
> You can also yell at me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pandora's box.

“And in our next segment, we have Captain Steve Rogers and New York Bulletin reporter Christine Everhart to discuss her explosive allegation that the United States government has ties to the targeted political assassinations in Afghanistan.”

It was the Sunday-morning panel shows that Steve hated the most. _Live-fire exercises in information warfare_ , he called them, and he never felt completely prepared for them. It didn’t help that this time he was squaring off against the reporter who’d ruined his life, either.

Or running into her in the hallway as he exited the green room.

“Good morning, Captain,” she said warmly, extending her hand. She was all blonde highlights and bright smiles this morning, cultivated perfectly to make important men underestimate her badly. Perhaps she forgot that Steve knew better than that.

“Good morning, Miss Everhart,” Steve said coolly as he shook her hand. “Has your source in Baghdad come forth with any other personal details of my life that you plan to share?”

“It’s just business, Captain,” she said, not breaking that glittering smile. “The public had a right to know.”

“You endangered my men.”

“So you’re confirming your team was all men?” she said sweetly. “I understood that there is—or was—at least one woman with you.”

“Miss Everhart, I have enormous respect for your profession and believe a free press is essential to a functioning democracy,” he said. “So please understand how much I mean it when I say this: Go to hell.”

Her grin widened. “Can I quote you on that?”

They were interrupted by a harried-looking production assistant with a headset and a clipboard waving at them. “Miss Everhart, Captain Rogers, places please. We’re on in 5 minutes.”

As Steve expected, things didn’t get any better once the cameras were rolling. Everhart again detailed the findings of her investigation: The two dozen assassinations of key U.S. allies, the Russian sniper bullet with no rifling, the mysterious bearded American who bought the Toyota with four bullet holes in the passenger door shortly before that town’s warlord was killed by one of those Russian bullets.

“I didn’t go to law school, Miss Everhart, but I still don’t see how this connects the U.S. military to the death of Abu Jalil, who, by the way, was a man who had a name and a family and was an active proponent of girls’ education in his town, and not just some convenient informant who could be bought for a few hundred bucks,” Steve said evenly. “He represented everything we wanted to see more of in Afghanistan, so even if we were in the business of assassinating political enemies, which we’re not, why in the world would we have killed _him_? All your reporting shows is that a Westerner carrying U.S. dollars was in the vicinity when the assassination happened.”

“Excuse me, Miss Everhart, but I just want to clarify something before this goes further: Does your reporting actually show that the person who bought the truck was a soldier?” Stephanopolous interjected. “You described him as, and I quote, _an American wearing some kind of fatigues and body armor_. Isn’t it possible he could have been a military contractor or something?”

“Or CIA, DHS, or FBI, or some other agency that will neither confirm nor deny having armed personnel in the Afghan theater,” Everhart said, smiling with bland prettiness. “Certainly.”

“Or a journalist. Didn’t you also wear body armor when you were reporting in the field?” Steve stalled, scrambling to recover. How had he missed this? How had all of them missed this? “It doesn’t matter who bought the truck, Miss Everhart. The question is: Who was driving it the day Abu Jalil was killed?”

“That _is_ the question, isn’t it?” Everhart replied serenely.

Too serenely, Steve realized.

She knew the answer. She had gone back to Afghanistan, reported it out, and knew the answer. The story was probably with her editor now. It was probably the whole reason she was here, on this show today—to gin up the public’s flagging interest in the scandal.

“Can you answer it, Miss Everhart?” Steve asked evenly.

The corner of her mouth quirked up. “When I do, I’ll be sure to call you for a quote,” she said.

“Well, folks, we’ll have to leave it here,” Stephanopolous said. “Reporter Christine Everhart with the Washington Bureau of the _New York Bulletin_ , and SHIELD spokesman Captain Steve Rogers, thank you so much for your time this morning. Next up, our guests are Maggie Haberman from the _New York Times_ and Deputy Labor Secretary Khadija Ross, here to discuss President Ellis’ new federal minimum wage proposal.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“She knows,” Steve said without preamble when Maria picked up the phone. He was still sitting in his car in the network studio garage, too jittery to drive yet. “Everhart. She has something.”

“She sounded like it,” Maria agreed. “I have a couple of friends on staff at the _Bulletin_. Let me put out some feelers and see what I can turn up. Good work today, Steve. I know she’s the last person you wanted to see. You were a real pro.”

“Maria, when did we start assuming the American with the truck was military?” Steve asked. “Do—do we know something, too?”

Maria was quiet for a long time. “No,” she said finally. “We just fucked up. We got blindsided by this, and just—fucked up.”

She was lying. Steve wasn’t sure how he knew—maybe she’d waited a beat too long to answer, maybe her tone of voice was just a fraction higher than it usually was—but Steve knew, in that moment, that Maria had not simply fucked up.

 _Too many secrets_ , he thought. _Too many lies_.

He was debating whether or not to call Natasha when his phone vibrated with an incoming text.

_Saw you on the idiot box and got me feeling some sort of way. Brunch at Little Cloud in an hour? You looked like you could use a whole pitcher of bloody marys._

Steve sighed. For the first time he didn’t want to—he wanted to know why Maria was lying to him, and though Little Cloud did a mean eggs benedict, it was always packed to the gills with tourists who would want his picture—

Who would want his picture.

_Is it weird that after a month of dating, the only evidence of your relationship with Bucky seems to be two fleeting references on his Instagram account?_

The mysterious American with the Toyota could wait. He had another mystery to solve.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was a beautiful spring Sunday and Little Cloud had a line around the block by the time Steve arrived. But Bucky had already been seated at a table by the large open window, drawn all the way up to the awning to admit the breeze.

Bucky stood up as Steve worked his way through the crowd, managing to draw attention to himself with every table he tried to squeeze past. Which is why half the eyes in the restaurant were on him when Bucky stood and kissed him on the cheek before he sat down.

“So this is the photo op?” Steve asked, grinning. “My office could have handled it.”

“But then we wouldn’t have bloody marys,” Bucky said, pushing the pitcher across the table. “And I knew I’d need a drink for this.”

“So, what, we just let people take our picture?”

“I’ll probably take some, too.”

“Thank you for giving me time to get out of the monkey suit, at least,” Steve said, gesturing toward his gray Army t-shirt and glancing back at the crowded restaurant and cringing internally at the number of phones that were out. Tourists were always the worst about wanting pictures with him, and this restaurant, in the ground floor of a popular hotel near the Smithsonian, was always full of them.

He permitted a few selfies while they waited for their food, being sure to tell them to tag him in the photo “because our public affairs office loves to see these” and angle himself so Bucky was in the background. Bucky clearly had the same idea, because at least once, with a couple of starstruck little boys, he had made sure to grin like a loon and put up his fingers in rabbit ears behind Steve’s head while the kids laughed with delight at the joke.

Steve was laughing too, and when he turned back around he saw Bucky pointing his phone at him and grinning. “Perfect,” he said, turning the phone around so Steve could see the photo he took. He looked happy and relaxed, and as Bucky returned to his camera roll, he saw that Bucky had taken photos of Steve fulfilling selfie requests from behind. These he quickly posted, followed by the photo of Steve laughing, and captioned it:

_When your boyfriend is @CaptainAmerica you sometimes have to share him at brunch. But come on, isn’t he worth it?_

“Boyfriend?” Steve asked, feeling his face heat.

“No?” Bucky said, his face falling. He grabbed his phone and swiped open the app again. “Oh God. Oh, I can—"

“No, no, not—it’s not a bad thing,” Steve said. “It’s—it was nice. I liked it.”

Bucky blushed and reached across the table to hold his hand. “Sorry, I guess we should have discussed it. It’s—been a long time since I’ve done this. I don’t know what the norms are anymore.”

“Me neither,” Steve admitted. “We can just make it up as we go along.”

Bucky grinned shyly. “Okay,” he said.

They made it through brunch relatively unscathed. Only one person bothered them while they were eating—a little girl with William’s syndrome who had slipped away from her table to give Steve a hug and didn’t let go, followed by her profusely apologetic mother.

“It’s okay,” Steve said, because he never minded the little kids. “Do you want a picture?” he asked the girl, who of course said yes.

“Here, I’ll take it so mom can be in the picture too,” Bucky said, holding out his hand. He took a photo first with the mom’s phone and then with Steve’s, such a natural thing to do when taking a picture for two unrelated people that Steve didn’t realize until afterward that it was the first time anyone had taken one of these with his own phone.

“Why did you do that?” Steve asked.

“Look across the street,” Bucky said, zooming into the photo. Parked on the curb was a dark gray SUV with Virginia tags, though there was mud splashed on the back bumper and tailgate that obscured half the plate number. It was neither particularly old nor particularly new—so ordinary in its ordinariness that Steve hadn’t even noticed it. “I’m pretty sure that’s the truck I saw outside your place that one night, and I saw it outside the restaurant last week, too.”

“Our paparazzi,” Steve said.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Bucky said. “He can’t follow us into the Mall.”

They quickly paid, Steve took one more picture, and they headed out into the afternoon. The SUV was gone by the time they made their way through the crowd to the door, but they caught sight of it again at a stoplight as they crossed the street into the National Mall.

They walked deep into the park, staying off the paths and under the trees until they were sure they weren’t being followed, then found a bench overlooking the Reflecting Pool to enjoy the sunshine.

Bucky tipped his sunglasses down and shook his hair loose from its ponytail and Steve stretched his arm along the back of the bench behind him. There was no question from their posture they were a couple, and it felt good. It felt good to have someone. It felt good to have _him_.

“That was the reporter who outed you this morning, wasn’t it,” Bucky said.

“Yeah.”

“I salute you for getting through that interview without biting her head off,” he said.

“There were a few tense words in the green room,” Steve admitted.

Bucky laughed softly. “You always did have to get your licks in.”

“She knew about my team,” Steve said. “Me, I don’t care about as much. But they’re still out there in harm’s way every day.”

“She knows about my team, too, I think,” Bucky said softly. Something in his voice had changed. There was tension in it now, and he’d ducked his head as he spoke, as though he was ashamed, or wanted to make sure nobody could see him say the words.

“What?” Steve asked.

“Act natural,” Bucky murmured, with a disorienting smile on his face that clashed with the urgency in his voice. “I’m about to tell you something that’s going to change everything you believe about this country.”

“Buck—”

“The assassination program is real,” he said quickly, as though he wanted to get it out before he changed his mind. “It’s a joint task force of a secret organization working within the U.S. government, in coordination with Russian intelligence, to destabilize U.S. influence abroad and pave the way for Russian domination. The organization originated with the Nazis and then reconfigured in the Soviet Union under Stalin after the war and has been actively infiltrating and undermining every branch and agency of the U.S. government. Its name is Hydra, and it’s currently run by Alexander Pierce.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” Bucky said, glancing toward the trees. “Laugh.”

Steve did, badly, then cleared his throat. “The Secretary of SHIELD is actively working to advance Russian power?” he asked, mostly because he had to give his mind time to catch up. It was impossible to believe, and yet— “There’s a secret organization? Bucky, how do you even _know_ this?”

“You saw my file,” he said, so quietly Steve almost didn’t hear him. “You saw both of them. Hydra is why Provision 13 exists at all.”

“You—you’re part of Hydra?”

“I didn’t—I didn’t know what it was at first,” Bucky pleaded. “You have to believe me. It was just a secret special ops team that was supposed to be the chance of a lifetime. The STRIKE team. And I wanted to do hard things—I know it sounds awful, but I wanted to make the hard calls. It felt heroic, and I know that’s stupid but it did. I’m not blaming you for this at all, but I never did get over seeing you in the middle of that asthma attack, and knowing you were going to die if I didn’t get you to a hospital. And I blamed the Ten Rings for that, and I wanted to—I don’t know. I wanted revenge for that, I guess. I wanted to make them hurt.”

“By killing good guys.” He pulled his arm away and leaned forward on his knees, debating whether or not to just walk away. He felt sick. He felt—he had not felt sick since 2004, and he felt sicker than he could ever remember feeling in his life. “Oh God, Bucky, why?”

“They took us to this camp in Siberia to train us,” Bucky said, and his voice began to waver a little. “But it wasn’t training, Steve. It was—” he shook his head and rubbed his mouth. “It was something else. They did things—”

“Things,” Steve said slowly.

Bucky gave Steve a sad, tight smile. “You know what they did at Abu Ghraib,” he said. “You know about the renditions. You know about the ‘enhanced interrogations.’ You know what they’re capable of.”

“You were tortured,” Steve said faintly. “Oh my God, Bucky.”

“Don’t,” Bucky said, shaking his head. “Please, I can’t do this here.”

Steve swallowed and nodded. A rapidly awakening panic was beginning to scrabble around inside his chest as he began to connect the dots. “They were trying to brainwash you?”

Bucky bit his lip and nodded and turned away for a moment. “They _did_ brainwash me. I didn’t understand how people could fall for it until they did it to me. But six months later, I was as much a believer as the rest of them. I really thought the world would be a safer place if I helped restore the Soviet Union and expand its reach across the globe. I believed it so much I was willing to kill for it.”

“Oh, God, Bucky,” Steve said. He took a long, slow scan of the park, trying to organize his thoughts. “How many people did you kill?”

“Me? All of them. There were others on the team, too, but—I was the sniper. I pulled the trigger.”

“Were you ever actually with the 107th?” Steve asked.

“I was at first,” he said. “My first two tours. Those are the guys whose pictures you saw in my place. At the end of my second, I got the offer to join STRIKE. That was early 2014. After we got back from Siberia I was working in Afghanistan nonstop until I got blown up last year.”

“They’re the ones who died in the IED attack, then?” Steve asked. “STRIKE?”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah. They were all technically 107th—but if you ask around, there won’t be anyone that remembers seeing any of them after 2014.” He shrugged.

“Are you still Hydra?”

“You never leave Hydra,” Bucky said. “But Steve—I don’t believe that stuff anymore. You have to believe me. After I got blown up, with the hospitals and the rehab and that year at home—I was honestly so sick and drugged up all the time that I think they figured I was done for. But I was clearheaded enough to come back to myself. I was—God, Steve, I wanted to die, I was so ashamed. I couldn’t believe I was capable of doing all those things—”

He shook his head and cleared his throat, and then nodded determinedly. “I decided I was going to expose them. I knew I was never going to get that if I had to spend my whole life taking care of my bum arm, so I agreed to the amputation. Of course Hydra wasn’t going to just let me retire and get a normal job after that, so they got me the gig with the CIA instead. They ordered me to flag any intel that might expose them, and then told me they would kill Becca and Lucy if I ever forgot who I worked for.”

“Oh my God, Bucky. This is treason,” Steve said. “You could go to prison for this. You could be executed.”

“I know,” Bucky said. “And I probably will.”

“What?” Steve asked. “Why? How?” 

“I was the one who tipped Christine Everhart off to the Toyota,” Bucky said. “I didn’t give her my name, but the man she’s talking about, with the beard and the body armor? That was me. I bought that truck, and I was the one who shot Abu Jalil. My partner, Brock Rumlow, was the one driving it, that day—I was lying in the bed under a tarp with my rifle—but if she has his name then it’ll be short work to connect him to me. The whole story is about me.”

“And do you think she’s figured out your name?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t care. I thought maybe if she was the one who exposed us, I could keep my family safe. I didn’t care about my own life, as long as I knew they were okay.” He shook his head and sighed. “I was so stupid.”

“Why?”

“We both know it’s not a journalist driving that SUV we saw this morning. I think Hydra knows it was me who tipped her off. And after that cute wink-and-nod performance of hers today, Hydra knows she knows who I am, too. And they’ll never let her live long enough to publish her story,” Bucky said. “They’ll kill her and burn down her apartment building and blow up the Bulletin’s offices just to make sure there’s no trace of it left. She’s just put dozens of lives in danger, including her own, and it’s all my fault.”

Steve stood abruptly, with cold, sickening knowledge pooling heavily in his gut. “You didn’t run into me by accident in the park, did you.”

“No,” Bucky said quietly. “I wanted—I wanted it to be known that we were friends. That I had a powerful ally. I thought it would help me protect Becca and Lucy if anything happened to me.”

“Was any of this real?” Steve asked in disbelief. “Us? Was anything about us real?”

“Yes,” Bucky said. “Oh God, Steve, when I said I would never lie about how I felt about you, that was true. If nothing else, I need you to believe this. I didn’t think things would move in this direction—I really just thought we’d meet for coffee, maybe hang out from time to time as old buddies, just reconnect, you know? Falling in love wasn’t part of the plan.”

“But it helped,” Steve said coldly. “Because now the whole world knows you’re not just my friend, but my boyfriend. It gives you better cover.”

“It gives _Becca and Lucy_ better cover,” Bucky said in a small voice. “But it wasn’t the reason I did it. I really do love you. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to walk away from this, or arrest me to protect yourself, or—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what happens to me anymore. I thought I could make things right, but I can’t, so I just need to make sure I’m the only one who pays for it. Hydra kills me, the government kills me—I don’t care as long as they’re safe.”

“I care,” Steve said angrily. “I care what happens to you. I have a _stake_ in this now, you know, and it’s not just my fucking reputation.”

“No, I’m not—” Bucky said, shaking his head forcefully. “I’m not telling you this to ask you to help me. I’m just warning you that things are going to start happening very quickly, and I might not have time later to explain why.”

“Bucky, what are you planning to do?” Steve demanded.

Bucky looked up at him, so stoic it was frightening. “It’s better if you don’t know,” he said. “I just—the only thing I would ask you to do is to go to Becca and Lucy when the story comes out, and take them somewhere safe till it’s over. I know you can protect them. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Don’t bring your phones. Try to steal a car if you can. Change cars and keep changing cars. I’ll give you cash. If you can get up to Canada, all the better. Just get them as far away from me as you can.”

He thought about that photo of the gun range target, thought about how hard he’d worked to shoot that well again, and understood a little better why he had. And the idea chilled him.

He could walk away right now. He _should_ walk away right now. He should call his lawyer and call the FBI and get as far away from this thing as he could.

But if Bucky was right, and Hydra really had infiltrated every branch of government—

He would be handing Bucky to them on a silver plate.

Steve took a deep breath and looked at Bucky, and for a minute he could see him at 16 again, angry and crying about having to move to Indiana, angry and worried about his dad and angry and worried about Steve, when all he wanted to do was keep his family safe. “No.”

“What?”

“No,” Steve repeated. “I’m not going to let you just run off on some suicide mission. We’ll figure this out together.”

“I need to know Becca and Lucy are safe, Steve,” Bucky said urgently. “Nothing we do matters if they’re not.”

“I told you I have people that I trust,” Steve said, praying—though he hadn’t prayed in earnest in 20 years—that he was telling the truth. “They can protect Becca and Lucy. Let me bring them in.”

Bucky’s jaw tightened and he jiggled his knee as he thought. “I don’t know, Stevie—”

“Bucky, I can’t let you do whatever it is you’re planning to do on your own. I just can’t. I’m angry at you for—everything—but I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I won’t do it.”

Bucky’s face crumbled then, just for a moment, and he took three deep, rapid breaths. “This will ruin your life,” he warned. “Probably forever.”

“I don’t care,” Steve said, then held out his hand. “Let’s go. You’re going to show me everything you have.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love all your comments. 
> 
> You can also yell at me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plots and blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tags. This is a heavy chapter. See end note for specific content warnings.

With a heavy sigh, Steve set Bucky’s laptop aside and rubbed his temples. He had just spent the past three hours on Bucky’s sofa as he walked Steve through reams of personnel files, secret budget accounts, code keys, operational correspondence, mission reports, even weapons specs.

There were thousands of government employees on Hydra’s payroll—Senator Stern’s appearance suddenly made the last four weeks make more sense. Some very highly placed, like Secretary Pierce, but most occupied the middle ranks of government, the faceless bureaucrats and deputies and analysts and aides who actually made the country run.

Like the SHIELD scientist who designed an asthma study that wasn’t an asthma study at all, but a secret clinical trial of a new super-soldier serum that Hydra had developed. A serum that had killed every participant but one: Steven Grant Rogers, 19, of Brooklyn, New York. 

Like Cpl. Wayne Green, aide to Gen. Chester Phillips, who had given Christine Everhart Steve's name. .

Like psychologists who designed the U.S. torture program that had ruined the bodies and minds of hundreds of prisoners of war—the same techniques that Hydra used in its indoctrination protocol. Steve found himself wiping away tears as he read it, knowing Bucky had probably endured it all.

The last thing he read was a memo detailing Hydra’s foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and its decision to use them to drive the United States into a state of permanent war in the Middle East.

Steve stood up quickly and went to get himself a glass of cold water, trying to keep himself from throwing up or losing his mind over the incalculable cruelty of it all.

“How did you get your hands on all this?” he asked finally.

Bucky gave Steve a grim smile and held up his hand, waggling his fingers.

“One hand, singular, and that is exactly how I did it,” he said. “There’s a lot of typing in my job, so I use a special one-handed keyboard at work. The CIA doesn’t have enough disabled employees to have any standard-issue adaptive equipment, so they just tell you to buy what you need and they reimburse you for it. So I made sure to choose one that connected via bluetooth.”

Then Bucky took out his phone and tapped open his network settings and then turned his screen so Steve could see. “My work computer records every device that connects to it for obvious security reasons—so I put my computer science degree to work and cloned my phone to look like my keyboard. I used that connection to access and download the files here.”

He thumbed through his phone again and clicked open an app called Focus, with an icon showing a silhouetted person in a meditation pose, and the phone began to emit a soft, relaxing white-noise sound. “The data from the files get hidden inside the white noise, I get through the metal detector easy as can be, and dump everything on this hard drive when I get home.”

“How long have you been collecting this?” Steve breathed. “You can’t have fit very much on your phone at a time. This must have taken months.”

“Eight, nine months?” Bucky said. “Almost from my first day.”

“You risked arrest every single day for the past nine months to do this?”

“Steve,” Bucky said levelly. “Hydra wouldn’t have let me live long enough to get arrested.”

Steve looked around Bucky’s apartment. “Explains why you have a better security system than Fort Knox.”

Bucky put his phone down and reached under the coffee table. Steve heard a faint snick and when Bucky lifted his hand again he was holding a .45 caliber automatic pistol, fingers fanned away from the trigger. “Explains why I have a loaded gun in every room in the house,” he said, turning the gun down to clip it back into the rack beneath the table.

Instead of being frightened, Steve suddenly felt immensely, terribly sad. “I wish you’d come to me sooner, Buck,” he said, shaking his head. “I hate that you were living like this all this time, and I didn’t even know.”

“Oh my God, Steve, don’t blame yourself for that. This is my own fault.”

“I might have believed that if I hadn’t just read 15 pages detailing Hydra’s indoctrination techniques,” Steve said, feeling his voice shake. “That’s what they did to you, right? The hypothermia and the drugs and the electroshock?”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, Steve,” Bucky warned. He slapped the laptop shut and took it back into his bedroom to return it to his safe in the closet.

Steve sighed and followed him. “I resent that,” he said. “I hate that they hurt you and I hate that they manipulated you and I hate that you had to struggle with that all by yourself and I hate that you’ve been living in fear for your life—for Becca and Lucy’s lives—this whole time. But the last thing I feel is sorry for you.”

Bucky finished locking the safe but remained sitting on the floor, facing the closet. “They raped us,” he said quietly, not looking up. “It wasn’t in the protocol but they did that too. Three times, they did it. I think they just did it for fun.”

“Oh, Bucky,” Steve murmured, dropping to his knees next to him. He put a cautious hand on Bucky’s shoulder and Bucky raised his hand to cover it. He turned his head toward Steve, his face a little pale, his eyes a little red, and gave him a small smile. “I’m okay,” he said, then gave a little shrug. “I’m working on being okay. I can’t take a chance with a therapist because of Hydra but the guy at the VA who facilitates the group I go to recommended a bunch of books for me, and it’s helped a lot. The plug we played with is part of that. Learning how to enjoy it again. Not to be scared of it.”

Steve felt his eyes widen. “Oh, God, Bucky, I never would have—”

“I haven’t done anything with you I didn’t want to do,” Bucky said firmly. “I haven’t. It was my idea, remember? But it’s why I wanted to take things slow. And I didn’t want to tell you before because I was afraid if I did, I would tell you _everything_ , and I wasn’t ready—”

“Can I hug you?” Steve asked, and Bucky gave him a tearful nod. Steve wrapped his arms around him and buried his face into his shoulder. “I am so, so sorry that happened to you. All of it. And I don’t feel sorry for you or pity you or think you’re broken or any of that. I think you’re the strongest person I know, and I love you, and I’ve always loved you, and I just—” He sniffled and then laughed. “I’m getting snot on your shirt.”

“Thanks, babe,” Bucky groaned, laughing a little and kissing Steve’s temple. He curled his fingers into Steve’s shirt. “I love you too, Steve. I do, I do, I do. And I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess.”

“I’m glad you did,” Steve said, sitting back on his heels. “We’ll figure this out. We will.”

“They’re gonna come for me,” Bucky said gravely. “And they’re going to come for you, too. And it’s going to be bad.”

Steve nodded. “I know,” he said, wondering if he truly did. “But we’ll face it together.” He leaned forward and kissed Bucky on the forehead. “Let’s get to work.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“So, is it legit?” Steve asked.

“Holy shit,” Natasha breathed. She clicked back to the personnel file Bucky had stolen, and read through it more carefully. “Steve, where did you get this?”

It was early Sunday evening and they were sitting in Steve’s apartment. It was a risk—aside from the occasional lunch or happy hour, he’d never socialized with Natasha after work, and anyone watching his apartment probably knew that. But it was less strange for her to come to his apartment on a Sunday afternoon than to Bucky’s, so he’d had to take it.

He knew she’d know something was up immediately when he invited her over to watch the Nationals play the Cardinals—she didn’t give a shit about baseball and she knew he knew that. But she’d played along, arriving wearing a Washington jersey and toting a six pack, with all the tools of her trade stashed in her bag, including a scanner for listening devices.

And now, just as the game was in the bottom of the ninth, Natasha had reached the end of Bucky’s files.

“First, tell me what you think.”

She shrugged. “I mean, I didn’t work for Russian intelligence that long so I can’t be a hundred percent sure, but this list of names?” she said, scrolling down again. “I’ve had my doubts about some of these guys for years. Stern, Sitwell, Whitehall, Ward, Malick—” She took a sip of her beer. “Yeah, it’s pretty convincing.”

“What do you think we should do about it?” Steve asked.

“I’d say to run, not walk, this over to the Justice Department and put it into the Attorney General’s hands yourself,” Natasha said, giving Steve a wry look. “But if this list is correct, she’s Hydra, too.”

“So what’s your second choice?”

“Nick Fury isn’t on this list,” she said, naming SHIELD's Director of Operations. “So one, get a copy to him. Two, secure your source’s family. Three, secure the data itself—give it to someone we trust, preferably someone who can park it somewhere the U.S. government can't touch it, like a friendly foreign embassy.” Natasha scrolled through the personnel list one more time. “And four: We tell the whole fucking world.”

“What country’s embassy are you thinking?”

“The Brits,” Natasha said immediately. “Our source says they’re clean, and they’ve been our closest ally for the past hundred years. If I had to trust this to foreign hands, it’s them.”

Steve nodded. “Good,” he said. “Good. I’m glad to hear you say that.”

Natasha grinned and sat back on the couch. “You didn’t ask me here to make a plan, you asked me here to vet yours,” she said, raising her beer. “Well played.”

“Sorry,” Steve said. “It’s impossible to know who to trust now. I knew if you said something different you were probably with them.”

“Don’t be,” Natasha said. “I’m impressed. Do I get to meet your source? I’m dying to know how they pulled this off.”

“Hang on a sec,” Steve said, tapping out a text: _Did you hear that? What do you think?_

In lieu of an answer, Bucky opened Steve’s bedroom door. “Agent Romanoff?” Bucky said, stepping into the living room and leaning over the coffee table to offer his hand. “I’m Bucky Barnes. Nice to meet you.”

“Oh, no way,” Natasha said, laughing a little as she shook Bucky’s hand. “I knew it. With a file like yours—”

“You have no idea,” Bucky said, settling into the armchair by Steve.

“Steve did tell you that I defected from the Russians in 2007, right?” Natasha asked. “I have a pretty good idea.”

Bucky said something in Russian then, and Natasha responded with a look of delight. They went back and forth a few times before Natasha caught Steve’s eye and said in English, “Bucky wanted to know if you were secretly a total diva at work and I told him yes, but only a little bit, but he didn’t believe me.” 

“Hey now,” Steve said, kicking Bucky’s foot lightly.

“I had to make sure she was who she said she was, too,” Bucky said, his smile fading. “She’s been in the States for a long time but she still has a St. Petersburg accent, like she's supposed to.” He shrugged. “One of my handlers was from there. She talks like him.”

Natasha smiled even wider. “Oh Steve, I _like_ him,” she said, applauding lightly. “Your accent’s not half-bad, either.”

Steve sighed. “Are we all satisfied now? Because we have half a government to overthrow and not a lot of time to do it.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Miss Everhart. Thanks for meeting me,” Steve said, gesturing to the seat next to him at the bar. He’d chosen a busy wine bar in Georgetown that he knew would be loud enough for them to talk without being overheard. “I wanted to apologize for my unprofessional behavior yesterday morning.”

“No you didn’t,” she said, smiling brightly, then hailed the bartender. “I’ll have a glass of the Chardonnay, please, on my own tab.”

“I insist—”

“I insist not,” she said. “I never accept drinks from sources.”

“Who said I’m a source?”

“If you wanted to apologize you would have just called,” she said. “And I know for a fact you’re not fishing for a date. So what’s up?”

Much as he resented how she’d blown up his life, in that moment he knew he’d chosen the right reporter for the job.

“Your Toyota driver,” Steve said quietly. “You have his name.”

“Do I?”

“Jack Rollins.”

She did a tremendous job of keeping her face passive, but the corners of her eyes crinkled just enough for him to know she was trying not to smile. She knew he was wrong.

Steve gave her a wry smile. “Thought so.”

“Do _you_ have his name?”

“I have a lot of names. Better ones. But only if you drop your story on the assassinations.”

“Why, Captain Rogers, is a member of SHIELD’s public affairs office bribing a journalist not to publish a story?”

“No,” Steve said. “Captain America is asking you not to publish the story in the interest of national security.” He leaned forward on his elbow. “And is offering you a better one instead. In the interest of national security.”

Everhart crossed her legs and sat back a little in her seat. “Well. This _is_ interesting.”

“Why did you want to become a journalist, Miss Everhart?” Steve asked. “I think we both know it’s not for the money.”

She glanced up at him, startled, and took a sip of wine to gather her thoughts. “When I was 14 there was a gym teacher at my school,” she said. “Every kid in the school knew better than to let themselves get caught alone in a room with him. And every now and then one of the boys in his class would just transfer to another school with no explanation of why. But we knew. Everyone knew, and nobody did anything about it, because he was a deacon at church and his father was the mayor, until a reporter with our student newspaper wrote a story about it. And then the TV trucks started to arrive, and he was arrested and went to jail.”

“Were you the reporter?” Steve asked.

“No,” she said. “My older brother was one of the boys who had to transfer schools. And he never would have gotten justice if it hadn’t been for her. And I never forgot that.” She swirled the wine in her glass—Steve noticed she had not yet taken a drink of it yet—and then looked Steve dead in the eye. “Society rots in the shadows, Captain Rogers, and my job is to shine a light. Simple as that.”

Steve nodded. “Good,” he said. “If that’s what you want to really do, then pull your story and listen to mine.”

She took a very small sip of wine. “I’m listening.”

Steve glanced at her bag, which was hanging off the back of her seat. The top was unzipped and he could see her laptop within. He nodded toward it. “Hand over your recordings, notes, and drafts first.”

She laughed. “No way,” she said. “I need something more than a juicy promise, Captain.”

“Jack Rollins was a member of a secret special operations team called STRIKE operating in Afghanistan between January of 2015 and December of 2018. The team was technically attached to the 107th Army Infantry, under the command of Lieutenant Brock Rumlow, with orders to identify and capture high-value Ten Rings targets,” Steve said, because he knew she already knew this. “Rumlow was the driver of the Toyota truck seen in the vicinity of Abu Jalil’s assassination, but that’s not the real story. The real story is who gave the orders, and for that, you’re going to have to be ready to deal.”

She set her wine glass on the bar and gathered her bag. “Thanks for the tip,” she said. “I’ll talk to my editor.”

“No,” Steve said, quickly touching her arm. He couldn’t risk anyone stopping this story from running. “You can’t talk to anyone else about this story. This has to stay secret until it appears on the front page. I need you to trust me.”

His desperation must have come through, because she startled briefly and put her bag back on the bar. “I can’t publish your story—or any story—without going through my editor, Captain. Or the copy desk, or the design team, or the typesetters—I can’t just sneak it into the paper at the last minute myself. That’s not how it works.”

“What about online?”

“Not unless I hack into the CMS and post it myself. Only editors have publish access.”

“What if we could make that happen for you?”

Everhart bit her lip and gave Steve an appraising look. “Who is _we_ , Captain? SHIELD? The Army?”

Steve shook his head. “I guarantee this is the story of a lifetime,” he said. “But you have to decide right now.”

“And if I say no?” she asked.

Steve swallowed. “I’m not threatening you,” he said. “I promise. But it would be in your best interests not to.”

“In the interest of national security.”

“And your own.”

She smiled and gathered up her bag again. “I used to be a combat reporter, Captain,” she said. “My photographer lost his leg at Gulmira, so you know that this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve covered a dangerous story. Now, I will keep this very strange and vaguely intimidating conversation between us, but I’m warning you, if you try to pull something like this again, I’m going to call Maria Hill, and I'm not going to be nice about it.”

“Miss Everhart—” Steve said urgently. “Please don’t do this.”

“Have a good night, Captain,” she said, tossing a few bills on the bar. “Thanks for the drink.”

He was still sitting at the bar, trying to decide whether or not to follow her, when he heard the shot. He was already running toward the door before the rest of the bar patrons understood what they’d heard, and he was the first to reach her. She was lying on the sidewalk, her blouse soaked with blood. She was breathing so faintly Steve thought she was dead at first.

“Oh God, Christine,” Steve said, pulling off his shirt to press to the wound. “Someone call an ambulance!” he shouted. “I’m so sorry,” he said softly to her. “I’m so sorry. I was hoping to keep this from happening. I was trying to protect you.”

“SUV,” she whispered. “Gray. White man, your age.”

“Shh,” Steve said. “Save your energy. We’ll find him.”

She swallowed and glanced desperately to her right, then at him again. “Bag,” she said.

Steve looked around and couldn’t see it anywhere. “He took your bag?”

She nodded, then gasped in pain from the movement.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. We’ll find it. Just keep breathing, okay? Just stay still and keep breathing.”

By the time the ambulance arrived, the police and the media had, too. Steve gave his statement to the police and a brusque no comment to the press, and then went back inside the bar to collect his jacket and slip out the back, into the alley. He zipped his jacket up over his bloodied undershirt and sprinted all the way home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bucky leaped up to meet him as he opened the door. “Steve, I saw on the news—"

“Is Nat still here?” he asked.

Bucky shook his head. “She went home to pack a bag. How’s Christine?”

“She’s alive, but I don’t know for how long. It was bad.”

“Oh Steve,” Bucky said, hugging him. He unzipped Steve’s jacket and helped him out of it, placing the flat of his hand against Steve’s bloodied chest. “Were you hurt?”

“No, it’s hers,” Steve said, then looked helplessly down at his shirt. “Bucky, they have her laptop. Her bag, her phone—whatever she knows, they know too now. Could she have anything that would link the tip to you? How did you contact her?”

“Signal,” Bucky said. “On a burner phone, paid for in cash in West Virginia. And I’m not too worried about any security camera footage either, assuming the store even still has it—my prosthesis sucks but it’s good for a disguise as long as I’m wearing long sleeves and gloves, which I was, because it was January.”

“They’ve probably been following her since her story came out,” Steve said. “They followed her to the restaurant—”

“So they probably know she was meeting you, too.”

“If they didn’t before, they do now,” Steve said grimly. “I was the first person to get to her.”

Bucky nodded. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “Change your clothes and pack a bag. I’ll call Nat to see if she’s got room for us there.”

Bucky followed him into the bedroom and put Natasha on speaker so Steve could hear.

“No can do, fellas,” she said. “I’ve had a tail since I left Steve’s. I can try to lose them when I leave, but my place is burned.”

“Hotel?” Steve asked.

“You’re not going to be able to hide in a hotel, Steve. Every tourist you see will want a picture of you,” Natasha said. “What about Maria? She used to be in the Marines, and she wasn’t on the list. She could be a good person to have on our side.”

“I’m not ready to read her in yet,” Steve said. “She’s not on the list, but she’s involved somehow. I don’t know how much, and I don’t think she likes it, but she knows it, and she’s lied to me several times about it. She’s protecting it, and she might not be doing it willingly, but I don’t think we can trust her.”

Bucky rubbed his mouth and then held his arm to his chest in an approximation of crossing his arms, and the gesture was so familiar, even one-armed, that it briefly yanked Steve back to high school. “I know someone,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: References to torture and rape, mention of a child abuser, depiction of a shooting.
> 
> I'm an English major. Please excuse the handwavey computer science. 
> 
> \---
> 
> I love all your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Say hello, say goodbye.

After leaving Steve’s apartment separately, they all took their respective tails on a dizzying tour of Washington by Metro, bus, and taxi so convoluted that by the time they rendezvoused with Natasha at 2 a.m. in an alley behind a little townhouse in Shaw, they had all been clean for the better part of an hour.

“He’s expecting us,” Bucky said, just as the door to the back deck opened to reveal a tall Black man in an Air Force t-shirt with perfect military posture and a kind, open face. They climbed the stairs to meet him and he quickly ushered them into his darkened kitchen.

“I’m Sam Wilson,” he said, shaking Steve’s hand. “I know who you are.” He turned to Natasha and shook her hand next. “Ma’am.”

“Natasha Romanoff,” Natasha said. “Sorry to crash in the middle of the night.”

“Come in,” he said, gesturing through the kitchen to the main living area of his apartment. “I’m renovating the upstairs units so we’re the only ones in the building right now.”

“Good,” Bucky said. “The fewer people between us and them, the better.”

Sam went to make coffee, and then they all sat down around his dining table to talk.

“Let's start with why we should trust you,” Natasha said bluntly. “Who are you, and how exactly do you know Bucky?”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said, glancing briefly at Natasha and then back to Sam. “You can tell them."

"I did two tours in Iraq as a pararescue jumper. Now I'm a civilian psychologist at Walter Reed,” Sam said. “I see patients one-on-one, and I facilitate group therapy sessions a couple nights a week. But I also attend one, because I can't do what I do if I don't take care of myself first—and that's how Bucky and I know each other," Sam says. “Most of the folks who come to group are dealing with some injuries—we meet at the hospital, so it's convenient for them. Some people just have trouble adjusting to civilian life. A lot of these guys have PTSD, either from the war or the hospital or both. And a lot of them are coping with something called _moral injury_ —which is the knowledge that we’ve all done things in war that we’ve always known to be wrong. Evil, even. For some guys it can be as bad as PTSD, but there’s no great way to treat it. But we try." He looks at Bucky. "I know Bucky did things he can’t talk about and that things were done to him that he won’t talk about. If he'd showed up in my office as my patient instead, I'd say he’s probably got the worst case of moral injury I’ve ever seen. I know he finds the secrecy as hard to live with as the acts themselves, and I know no matter how much I try to convince him that he needs more help than he can get in group therapy, he won’t take a referral from me.”

Bucky was gazing intently at his coffee, and Steve reached over to rub his back. He noticed Sam watching him as he did. Taking the measure of him.

“But I know one thing he’s not suffering from is paranoia,” Sam said. “So when he tells me that his secrets have put his life in danger, I believe him.”

“Our being here also puts _your_ life in danger,” Bucky said. “You know that, too.”

Sam shrugged. “I’m not saying this doesn’t sound like the beginning of a bad Michael Bay movie, but pararescue jumpers are used to going places no one else will to rescue people, and we don’t scare easy.” He nodded toward Bucky’s laptop. “So read me in, because I’m helping whether you like it or not.”

Bucky exchanged a glance with Steve, then nodded and opened his laptop. “In January of 2014, I was asked to join a classified special ops team called STRIKE. We assumed we were still operating under the Army’s chain of command, because why wouldn’t we? But about 15 minutes after we left Bagram to begin our training, and we noticed we were going east instead of west, we learned we were going to be working for someone else.”

It was the third time that day that Bucky had had to walk someone through the most traumatic truths of his life, and like Steve, he had been awake for more than 20 hours. Even Steve was starting to fray a little, but Bucky held steady, giving Sam time to absorb what he was hearing, answering his questions, making sure he fully understood what he was getting into.

The sun was rising and Natasha was making another pot of coffee by the time they finished.

“It’s Monday,” she said, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Does anyone need to go to work today?”

“I already messaged my assistant to reschedule all my appointments this week,” Sam said.

“Maria’s not going to want to put me anywhere near a TV till this blows over,” Steve said, scrolling through the news sites on his phone. He held up the front page of the _Washington Post_ for them all to see what the top story was: _Captain America Saves Life of Reporter who Outed Him After Drive-By Shooting_.

He swiped through his unanswered text messages and discovered that Maria had ordered him to take the next few days off already. He tapped out a quick thanks and pushed his phone away.

Bucky was already leaving a message on his manager’s extension. “Hate to do this, Joanie, but I’m having a bad pain day,” he said. “I’ll try to be in tomorrow.”

Something in his voice—a shaky weariness—made Steve pay closer attention to his face, and he realized that Bucky wasn’t lying.

“Do you need to take anything?” Steve asked quietly, and knew it was bad when Bucky nodded.

“We should all rest,” Natasha said quickly. “We’re all safe for now. Let’s recharge and regroup in a few hours.” 

Sam gave Bucky—and by extension, Steve—his bed, while Natasha took the sofa and he stretched out on a camp mattress in front of the door with a loaded gun on the floor next to him.

“What can I do?” Steve asked, shutting the door. He crossed to the window and drew the blinds for good measure, then sat down next to Bucky on the bed and rubbed the back of his neck. Bucky’s back muscles were as tense as bridge cables.

“That helps,” Bucky said, reaching over and rubbing his bad shoulder. His eyes were a little glazed from the pills. “It never totally goes away, but it hasn’t come back like this in a long time.”

“It’s been a long day,” Steve said. He scooted behind Bucky and began to rub his shoulders gently, pressing little kisses into the back of his neck as Bucky rubbed circles into the left side of his chest, then shifted his hand to knead his amputation site.

“Want me to do that?” Steve asked softy, and Bucky nodded.

“Gentle,” he said.

“Okay.” It was the first time Steve had ever put his hand directly on the scar, and he read it like a blind man, delicately mapping out the bones and muscles and folds of skin, paying close attention to Bucky’s breath to learn what helped and what didn’t before applying a little more pressure. “Like this?”

Bucky’s breath hitched and his fingers curled into the bedspread, but he nodded. “The nerves are still looking for my hand, or something,” he said. “Just have to distract them until they calm down.”

“On it,” Steve said, kissing the back of his neck again. He massaged Bucky’s shoulder until Bucky’s eyes began to drift shut and he began to nod. “You’re exhausted. Does it hurt too much to lie down?”

Bucky shook his head and Steve helped him curl up on his right side, snuggling in behind him. “Try to rest,” Steve said.

And he did. He fell asleep quickly, borne off by an opioid haze, while Steve settled more slowly, shaking a bit as the adrenaline of the past day and night finally began to drain off. But it didn’t seem to bother Bucky, who was as peaceful as Steve had ever seen him be.

 _Let this work_ , Steve asked the universe as he began to follow Bucky into sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bucky was still asleep when Steve awoke four hours later. He carefully slid out of bed, gently tucking a pillow against Bucky’s back so he wouldn’t roll over without Steve supporting him, and padded out into the main living area of Sam’s apartment.

Natasha was still asleep, too, but when he went into the kitchen to make coffee he found it already made, and Sam drinking a cup on the small back deck where they’d entered the apartment the night before.

“Hey,” Steve said softly. “Did you get any rest?”

“Couple hours,” Sam said, gesturing toward the chair next to him. “I’m not big on sleep anymore.”

“I hear that,” Steve said, sitting down. “Your job must be hard, listening to everyone else’s problems.”

“One of the first things you learn is how not to take your work home with you,” Sam said. “But there's a reason I go to group, too."

“You worry about Bucky.”

Sam nodded. “So do you.”

“Of course.”

“He’s come a long way,” Sam said, giving Steve a deliberate look that told him he was speaking to him as much as he was speaking about Bucky. “Deciding to get help’s hard. Some guys carry it for years before they realize they can’t carry it anymore.”

Steve hummed noncommittally and took a sip of his coffee. “Why are you doing this for us, Sam?” he asked. "After what you heard last night, nobody would blame you for walking away from this."

Sam laughed softly, accepting Steve's redirection gracefully. “I don’t have a savior complex, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “Though I'd be lying if I said it wasn't partly for my patients. None of them are ever going to be the same, you know? They'll learn to cope, and hopefully learn to thrive, but there's always going to be scars. That's just how it works. And it pisses me off that it was all for nothing. I lost someone important to me over there, and it was all for nothing. All those civilians over there whose lives were ruined—for nothing." He was quiet for a long minute, considering his mug. “But mostly it's because I'm an optimist. Always have been. And the way Hydra's infecting our politics and infecting people's minds and making it easier to hate and kill—the system's _always_ been broken, but these assholes are trying to set us back a hundred years, and I can't let that happen, you know? I know if I let myself get cynical, I might as well give up. And I won't do that. I won't.” 

Steve nodded. "I hope I won't let you down."

"Of course you won't," Sam said wryly. "You're Captain America."

Steve winced but accepted the ribbing for what it was. “What was their name? The person you lost, I mean.”

“Riley,” Sam said. “He was my wing man. We were jumping into a hot LZ, and his chute got hit by an RPG. Nothing I could do but watch him fall.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry,” Steve said. Something in Sam’s voice made him ask, “He was a friend, or—?” he shook his head. “Sorry. It’s not my business.”

“It was _or_ ,” Sam said. “We didn’t label it, wasn’t any point because fraternizing was prohibited. But we’d started to make plans to live together after the war, so.” He gestured back toward the house. “After two tours, we were done fighting. He was going to go to law school and I was going to get a psychology degree and we were going to buy a place and fix it up together. Settle down. Maybe raise some kids. Try to make a difference in other ways. Doing it solo and renting out the top floors to pay the mortgage wasn’t part of the plan, but not doing it at all seemed worse.”

Steve hummed and nodded. “I think he’d be glad to see you going through with it,” he said.

“It’s nice to think so."

Just then, Steve’s phone buzzed with a text from Peggy: _On the ground safe and sound. Wish you were here to meet me, love._

Her journey had just begun. She would take a cab to the Hilton with a suitcase big enough to last a week, check in and leave everything she couldn’t carry in a backpack in her room, ask the concierge to make a 9 p.m. reservation for two at a trendy restaurant in Greenwich Village that she would never keep, then slip out to do some sightseeing. At Grand Central Station, after admiring the atrium and the clock and a late lunch at the famous oyster bar, she would disappear into the evening rush-hour crowd to hop the subway connector to Penn Station, and catch an express train to Baltimore. From there she would rent a car and drive to Washington, and arrive at an AirBnB in Georgetown, a 15-minute walk from the British Embassy, that evening. 

Steve allowed himself one moment to marvel at how insane the past day and a half had become before returning to the present.

“Since Christine Everhart can’t blow this story open, I’ll have to do it myself,” Steve said.

“I was wondering about that.”

“If I don’t come back, will you look in on him?” Steve asked. “You and Natasha? He doesn’t have a lot of people he can count on and I’m afraid once this all comes out, he won’t have any.” 

Sam looked as if he was about to chide Steve for his pessimism, then caught himself. “He's my friend, too,” he said. “I promise he won’t be alone.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Becca lived in a charmingly narrow little townhouse on an equally narrow little side street in a historic neighborhood a few blocks from Johns Hopkins. Bucky directed Steve into the little alley behind the house, where there was a paved parking area just large enough for two cars. Steve pulled the car Sam had rented for them in next to Becca’s Prius and parked.

Becca and Lucy were already waiting for them at the back door, Lucy running down the stairs to greet Bucky and Becca jogging down a little tearfully to hug Steve.

“Oh my God, I didn’t realize just how big _you_ really got,” Becca laughed, stepping back to take him in. “Just look at you!”

“Look at you, all grown up,” Steve said, squeezing her tight, because she had. Even though he’d seen her in a few of Bucky’s photos, it was only now that he really saw the little girl he’d known. She’d grown up into a beautiful fat woman with the same little crinkles around her eyes that Bucky had, and the same shower of freckles she’d always had, and the same big laugh that he hadn’t realized he remembered until he heard it again. “Oh, it’s so good to see you,” he said, a little emotionally, then hugged her again.

“Bobo!” Lucy demanded, holding up her arms. Her hands were streaked with magic marker and her curly hair was a mass of dark tangled ringlets. Bucky laughed and kneeled down to scoop her up onto his hip.

“What’s this? How did you get so big?” He buried his mouth into her shoulder and made a comical roaring sound that made her shriek with delight. “Gimme a hug, Lucy Monster,” he said, a little thickly, and pressed his face against hers as she squeezed him tightly around his neck. He swayed a little, as practiced as any parent holding a toddler, and his eyes met Steve’s as he did. For a fleeting moment he looked desperately sad, before grinning and planting a fat kiss on the top of her head.

“You want to say hi to Steve?” he asked, and she nodded and turned a little so she could face him. “He likes to do art, too.”

“Hi Lucy,” Steve said. “I was hoping you could show me some of your pictures after dinner.”

She nodded shyly then buried her head back into Bucky’s shoulder.

“Come on, Stevie,” Becca said, linking her arm through Steve's to usher him inside. “You have to tell me everything.”

They spent most of dinner reminiscing about Brooklyn, and about Steve’s mom, and about all the good times they’d had together as kids. This dinner was as much for Becca and Bucky too, even if Becca didn’t know it yet, so Steve seeded the conversation with questions about their years in Indiana, when it was just the two of them, trying to fill the evening with good memories of one another.

Steve got so caught up that he almost—though not quite—forgot why they were there. They were just finishing dessert when Sam texted to let Steve know he was near. He caught Bucky’s eye and nodded, and he responded with a tiny nod of his own.

Becca looked back and forth between them and grinned. “What do you two have planned?”

Bucky smiled brightly and turned to Lucy. “Hey, Lucy Monster. You want to run upstairs and get some of your favorite pictures to show Steve?”

She grinned and slid out of her seat, padding up the stairs to her room.

“Now I _know_ something’s up,” Becca said, less amused now.

“Becca, I want you to go upstairs and pack anything you can’t live without for a couple of weeks, and do it right now,” Bucky said very quietly, his smile disappearing. “I wish this was a joke, but it isn’t. Remember all that stuff in Afghanistan I can’t talk about? Well, it’s coming back to bite me in the ass. This isn’t something the police can help with, and I need to make sure you two are safe.”

“What?”

“Becca, just do it,” Bucky said, more urgently now. “I swear—I just need you to do it.”

“Not until you tell me what’s going on,” Becca demanded. “I have a life, Bucky. I have a job and a mortgage—I can’t just—”

“We’re trying to prevent what happened to Christine Everhart from happening to you too,” Steve said bluntly, and didn’t apologize when Becca paled. “So do what he says, and do it now. A friend of ours is going to take you somewhere safe. He’ll be here any minute now.”

Becca swallowed and stood up. “Are you involved with something illegal, Bucky?”

“It’s complicated,” Bucky said, standing up too. “Come on, I’ll help you. We have to hurry.”

Steve washed the dishes and cleaned out the fridge while Bucky helped Becca and Lucy pack, taking the opportunity when he took out the trash to scope out the block. There was no gray SUV anywhere to be seen, nor any other cars—or people—to give him pause. He didn’t discount the possibility that Hydra might have someone posted in an apartment across the street—in fact, the more the thought about it, the more likely it seemed—but he couldn’t do anything about that.

His phone buzzed with another text from Sam telling him he was here.

Steve went back inside, locked the door, wedged a chair under the front door's doorknob for good measure, drew the curtains, turned off the lights, and put on a movie. The flickering light of the TV in the dark would give the illusion that they were still there while covering any shadows or silhouettes they cast as they left through the back.

Thankfully Lucy was confused but excited, and Steve’s heart broke a little to hear Becca chattering excitedly about the surprise trip they were going to take together to the woods, where they would play beneath the trees and swim in the lake and roast marshmallows in the fire at night.

They were going to Steve’s cabin in the Catskills—and for once, Steve was grateful for his fame, because like every celebrity seeking peace and quiet, he’d had to buy the place through an arcane system of shell corporations that only linked back to a bank account in the Cayman Islands. It was, in other words, about as secure as they could get. 

“There’s no cell service out there, but there is wi-fi and a landline,” Steve said, pressing the key into her hand. “Get your groceries in Poughkeepsie—somewhere big enough that nobody will notice a face they don’t recognize. Get enough for a few weeks, at least—once you get there you’ll want to stay there. The nearest neighbor is half a mile down the road, but try to keep the curtains closed, anyway, and park the car in the shed. If anyone sees, just play the happy family on vacation renting the cabin, and it should be fine. They have no idea who owns it.”

“Okay,” Becca said.

“Sam’s a good guy,” Bucky said, lifting Lucy up to carry her out. “You can trust him.”

“I trust _you_ ,” Becca said, shouldering her backpack. Steve picked up the suitcases and followed them out to the alley, where Sam’s SUV was idling. He and Sam switched keys, and they loaded the bags into the trunk of the rental while Becca fished out Lucy’s booster seat from her car and installed it into the back seat.

Bucky held on to Lucy as long as he could, swaying and bouncing her and listening to her chatter about all the animals that live in forests, before he finally had to relinquish her to her mother to strap in.

He swallowed hard and looked at Sam. “You got the guns?” he asked quietly. Bucky had left his apartment with a bag full of them—and bullets, and body armor, and about $10,000 worth of U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, Mexican pesos, and Euros—and had bestowed Sam with two Glocks and a hunting rifle to use if things got too hot at Steve’s cabin.

“I’ll take good care of them,” Sam said. “You focus on taking care of you, okay? Because if I gotta go to group and not see you there—”

Bucky nodded and enveloped Sam in a hug. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“I wish I could do more,” Sam said.

“This is everything,” Bucky said. “Thank you.”

“Guys,” Steve said quietly. “We need to be back in D.C. in an hour.”

Bucky nodded and turned to Becca, hugging her hard. “Love you, sis,” he said. “Stay safe, okay?”

“You’re taking us to Disney World for her birthday for this,” Becca said sternly, if a little tearfully. “And you’re riding every ride with her while I go to the spa.”

Bucky nodded, also a little tearfully. “You got it.” He kissed her cheek and hugged her one last time, then leaned into the car to give Lucy a kiss on the head, too. “Be good for your mama and Sam, okay? Sam’s a good friend and you’re gonna have lots of fun together, I know.”

Lucy looked at him gravely and nodded. “Will he draw pictures with me?” she asked.

“Sure I will,” Sam said, getting into the car. “What do you like to draw?”

Lucy was still listing her favorite picture subjects when Steve closed their doors and they pulled away.

Steve watched Bucky quickly wipe his eyes, then square his shoulders and turn toward him. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kept writing and rewriting this chapter after my brilliant beta gave it back to me, so please blame any typos and/or dumb choices on me. Thank you to Dazzledfirestar for some helpful last-minute input. This is my first time writing Sam and welcome your feedback on his characterization! 
> 
> Update, for accountability: Sam was originally the facilitator of Bucky's group. I had hoped that by having him provide therapy in a strictly professional capacity (i.e. he was getting paid for it, not just performing free emotional labor) I was doing right by him. But since then I've done some more reading and thinking and listening to folks, and as a result have tweaked that a little to create more distance. He is still a therapist, because that's such a huge part of his character in both the comics and movies that I wanted to honor that, but he is no longer Bucky's therapist. I hope this works better. 
> 
> \---
> 
> I love your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The long night.

“Oh my God, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Peggy said, wrapping her arms around Steve’s neck and planting a fat kiss on his cheek. They were deep inside a wooded park not far from where Peggy was staying, Peggy dressed as though she were on a late-night run, if an ill-advised one, to give her an excuse to duck into the woods alone. Steve did notice the bulge of a small handgun tucked into the back of her leggings when he’d hugged her, however.

“You too, Madge,” Steve, returning the kiss and breathing into the scent of her hair. They’d only seen each other in person once since Peggy had been sent home—over a year ago, when she was still leaning on a cane following one of the half a dozen surgeries on her leg. She'd been too sore at the time for more than a gentle hug, and it felt wonderful to make up for it now. He stepped back and smiled. “Look at you walking now. No limp.”

“Not quite gone, but I can run again and I can dance again, which is all that matters,” she said, grinning, and then reached for Bucky. “Come here, you,” she said warmly.

She hugged Bucky tight and whispered something into his ear that made him laugh and nod.

“Sorry to be meeting like this,” Bucky said as they parted.

“My country has already survived two world wars but I’m not interested in learning how it will fare in a third one, which is where I surmise Hydra is going with this project,” she said, casting a cautious glance over her shoulder. “You have the files?”

Bucky nodded and handed over a keyring strung with a dozen jump drives. “There’s more, but MI6 should be able to connect the rest of the dots with this if it comes down to it.”

“How do you know none of them are compromised?” Peggy asked, zipping the drives into the pocket of her jacket. “Surely Hydra must have its eyes on your allies, too.”

“We don’t know for sure,” Bucky said. “But I haven’t seen any evidence of it, and Steve trusts you not to hand it over unless you have to, so.”

“You know what you need to do?” Steve asked.

“I’m going straight to the embassy,” she said. “My rank allows me to request a secure room, no questions asked, in any British embassy for as long as I need it, and there I’ll stay and babysit the data till I get the all-clear from you.”

“Or until you don’t,” Bucky said, glancing at Steve. "If you don't hear from us in 24 hours—"

Peggy’s face hardened. “Then that’s when I get to work.”

“Peg, if you do this—”

“Respect my decision, Steve,” Peggy said, waving him off. “I’m doing this because I love my country and I’m sworn to defend its allies, and because Junior didn’t deserve to have his face blown off, and because both our countries fucking _tortured_ people over this pointless war, and because not so long ago we were both prepared to die for one another." She frowned and looked in the direction of the embassy, just a short jog over the ridge. "Wearing a suit to work now doesn’t change that.”

Steve stood for a moment, taking in her fire, and realized he was talking to Peggy again—the real Peggy, not the anxious and fretful and drunk Peggy—for the first time in years. “Be careful, Madge,” he said, hugging her again. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” Peggy said, and then as she parted from him, said to Bucky, “Look after him, would you, Bucky? Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bucky said with a gentle salute. 

Peggy nodded at each of them in turn. “Well, off I pop, then,” she said. “Fair winds and following seas, and all that. Good luck.”

And with that she turned and ran down the trail toward the northern entrance to the park, which would deposit her on a street six blocks from the embassy. He could see the limp plainly now, but she was running, and she was running fast, and Steve couldn’t help but feel like a part of his heart was going with her.

He watched her till the trail curved out of sight, then turned to Bucky. “Okay. Let’s go.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

They returned to Sam’s to find that Natasha was still gone. She might be out all night, they knew—she first had to convince Nick Fury that the information was real, and then secure a safe place with the most secure internet connection ever made for Bucky to release his files to the world.

It was almost midnight, but neither one of them could sleep yet—Steve didn’t think Bucky would until Sam confirmed he’d safely delivered Becca and Lucy to Steve’s cabin, which wouldn’t be for at least another hour or two.

After a sweep of the building to make sure they were still alone, Steve walked Bucky into the bathroom and turned the shower on. They undressed each other quickly and wordlessly, exchanging a few kisses and nuzzles as they helped each other out of their clothes.

They stepped in and began to soap each other up, using the excuse to touch and tease and pinch and kiss till they were both hard. With the water at his back, and Bucky’s back leaning against his chest, Steve took Bucky’s cock into his hand and began to stroke.

Bucky groaned with pleasure, holding on to the towel bar to keep himself steady. “You could put your finger in,” he murmured.

Steve gently slid his left hand down Bucky’s lower back, parting his cheeks, and trailing the tip of his middle finger along the sensitive skin in the crease. He teased the hole for a little while, letting him get used to his touch, enjoying the way Bucky was rocking his hips in anticipation. “Ready?” he asked softly, nipping at Bucky’s ear.

Bucky nodded, so he slipped the finger in, very slowly, feeling Bucky pulse and relax to admit him until he was all the way in.

“This okay?” Steve asked, and Bucky said, “more than okay,” and so Steve took hold of Bucky’s dick again and began to stroke as he dropped tender kisses along Bucky’s jaw and ear. Bucky groaned and rocked his hips back and forth, and then mumbled, “more,” and without letting go of his dick, Steve pushed another finger in until Bucky sighed with pleasure.

“Oh, fuck, Stevie,” he said. “That’s good.”

Steve kissed and nibbled Bucky’s ear as he slowly jerked him off as the bathroom filled with steam, the slick and slap of their bodies punctuating the soft rushing fall of the water pouring over their backs. Bucky began to move his hips more insistently, seeking more pressure from Steve’s fingers, more friction from his hand, and he began to grunt and curse softly, urging him on.

He came suddenly and swiftly with a surprised arpeggio of gasping cries, collapsing against Steve’s chest with a deep sigh and turning his face back for a kiss. “I love you,” he said. “Thank you.”

The water began to turn cold, so they quickly finished washing and stepped out of the tub. As they wrapped each other in towels, Bucky noticed that Steve was still half-hard, and dropped to his knees on the bath rug.

“No, wait,” Steve said, touching Bucky’s cheek. “Use your hand. I want to see your face.”

“You got it.” Bucky slicked Steve’s cock up with his tongue, then drew a stripe up his belly with his tongue and paused to suck and nibble on each of his nipples in turn before drawing himself up to his full height. Steve would never get over seeing him from this angle, without having to look up. He was so beautiful like this, smiling softly with parted lips, his eyes locked on Steve’s as he wrapped his hand around Steve’s cock and began to stroke.

Steve cradled Bucky’s face in his hands and began to kiss him slowly and deeply, tasting his mouth and sucking on his lips, dragging his tongue along the roof of Bucky’s mouth to intensify the sensation.

“I love how wet you get,” Bucky said, expertly sweeping Steve’s precome off the head and spreading it down the length of his cock. “Jesus, it’s so fucking hot how wet you get.”

“I love _you_ ,” Steve whispered between kisses, nuzzling Bucky’s nose and stroking his jaw with his thumbs. “I’m never going to lose you again.”

“Steve—”

“Shh,” Steve said, kissing him again. “This is my promise.” Another kiss, and then another. Bucky’s hand felt perfect around him, perfect and warm and right, and it became harder and harder to catch his breath. “After tomorrow, no matter what, we’ll be together.”

His voice was nearly gone by the end of his sentence, and his legs grew watery and weak. He broke away from his kiss and just held Bucky’s gaze as he brought him closer, watching Bucky’s eyes play across his face and a soft lazy smile break across his lips, seeing him and _loving_ him so much, so much he couldn’t breathe, and—

“Oh, God,” Steve gasped. “Oh God, Bucky, I love you so much, I love—” His words dissolved into a soft groan as he came, spilling over Bucky’s hand and spattering his skin. He sat back heavily on the sink counter and hooked his fingers around Bucky’s hips, lightly pulling him in close for a kiss.

Bucky stepped in close and they wrapped their arms around each other, just holding one another until Steve’s aftershocks began to fade.

“I know why you did things this way tonight,” Bucky said softly, touching Steve’s cheek. “You wanted to make sure I had one last good night with Becca and Lucy,” he said. “You wanted a chance to hug your best friend one more time, and introduce her to me.”

“Yes.”

“Just in case.”

“Yes.”

Bucky kissed him one more time. “I love you for that.” 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“No!”

Bucky’s shout woke Steve with a start. He discovered Bucky curled up tightly on his right side, his eyes wide open, hyperventilating and soaked with sweat.

“Buck,” Steve said softly, touching Bucky’s side.

But the touch startled him and he scrambled out of bed, grabbing blindly for the gun he’d left on the nightstand without Steve realizing it.

“You can’t touch them,” Bucky growled, pointing the gun at Steve. “I won’t let you.”

“Bucky, it’s me,” Steve said, holding up his hands in surrender. Bucky was wild-eyed and desperate and confused, and it was a terrifying thing to see. “It’s Steve. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”

“No,” Bucky said, shaking his head. “You’re lying. Don’t touch them!”

Steve swallowed. “Don’t touch who, Bucky?” he asked as calmly as he could, though his heart was pounding so hard he could barely keep his voice steady. “Becca? Lucy? They’re safe. Sam took them somewhere safe, don’t you remember?”

“You’re not Steve!” Bucky shouted. “Stop lying to me!”

“Put the gun down, Buck, and we’ll talk about it,” Steve said desperately, trying to work out how he could tackle Bucky and get the gun away without getting shot. “Becca and Lucy are safe. I really am Steve. You’re safe, too, I promise.”

“No you’re not!” Bucky insisted. “You can’t _trick_ me!”

“I look different now, Bucky,” Steve said, grief scooping out an enormous hole inside him as he realized Bucky was somehow still imagining a Steve who was 5-foot-4 and 94 pounds. “Listen to my voice. Close your eyes and listen to my voice,” Steve said, tears running down his face. “I sound the same, right? Please just listen to my voice.”

Bucky looked at him skeptically, but he dropped the gun a few inches. “I don’t—” he started, then looked at the gun in his hand in confusion. “What?”

“Bucky?”

Bucky looked up at him again in horror. “Oh my God,” he said, taking his finger off the trigger and sinking to the floor. He slid the gun forcefully under the bed and drew his knees up to his chest and tucked his head in, covering it with his arm. “Oh my God,” he gulped. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“Shh,” Steve said, sliding off the bed to join him on the floor and slide his arm around Bucky’s shoulders. “Hey, come here. It’s all right. You’re all right now. It’s okay. I’m fine. Everyone’s safe now,” he said, pressing a kiss into the side of Bucky’s head. “We’re okay.”

“I almost shot you,” Bucky whispered. “Stevie, I could have killed you.”

“But you didn’t,” Steve said. “You didn’t. I’m fine. Scared the shit out of me, but I’m fine, okay? I really am.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky wept. “Oh God, Steve, I’m so fucked up.”

“Shh,” Steve said, rocking him a little. “It’s going to be okay. I’m going to help you, Buck. You’re going to be okay.”

Bucky shook his head. “They fucked me up, Stevie,” he said. “I’m not safe.”

“Bullshit,” Steve said. “I’m not giving up on you, okay?” He clutched Bucky a little tighter. “I love you and I’m not giving up on you.”

Bucky began to sob then, clutching Steve’s t-shirt and wailing wordlessly as six years of tightly suppressed pain and trauma began to finally boil over. Steve shushed and rocked him until he cried himself out and came to rest, shivering and whimpering, against Steve’s chest.

“I love you, Bucky Barnes,” Steve said, carding his fingers through Bucky’s hair. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky whispered, easing himself up and wiping the snot and tears from his face before leaning wearily against the wall. “It’s always gonna be with me, you know.” He twirled his finger in a lazy circle around his ear. “The shit they did to me.”

“I know.”

“It’ll happen again.”

“I’ll keep the guns out of the bedroom, then.”

Bucky laughed softly. “Then I’ll _never_ fall asleep.”

“I’ll keep you safe,” Steve said.

Bucky laughed softly again but shook his head. “Tell my brain that.”

Steve crawled over to the bed and fished out the gun, quickly clearing the chamber and ejecting the magazine. He tossed the bullets onto his backpack and slid the empty gun across the room toward Bucky’s duffel bag of weapons.

“Let’s start tonight, hm?” he said, standing up and holding out his hand.

Bucky gave him a look of weary resignation and accepted Steve’s hand up.

“Steve—”

“Enough apologizing,” Steve said, kissing his forehead and climbing across the bed to retrieve his phone to show him the text from Sam that they’d received just before they went to bed: _Safe and sound. Good luck._ “See?” Steve said. Then, to reassure himself, he looked at a similar message from Peggy: _Finally, a decent cup of tea_. Then he set the phone aside and held out his hand. “Come to bed.”

Bucky gave him a skeptical look, but climbed into bed and let Steve tuck the covers around them.

“I’m right here,” Steve said, sliding his hand around Bucky’s chest and holding him close. “I’ve got you.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To Steve’s surprise, they both slept after that—hard. They didn’t wake until they heard Natasha’s footsteps and realized the sun was all the way up.

They washed and made themselves decent enough for breakfast in t-shirts and sweats and padded barefoot out into the living room in search of coffee.

“Good morning,” she said, and without any other preamble pushed an unusually compact, curved keyboard across the table toward him. “SHIELD is a little more progressive than the CIA when it comes to stocking adaptive equipment. You should be able to plug this into any SHIELD computer without triggering a security alert.”

“Oh, excellent,” Bucky said, experimentally tapping out the alphabet and nodding with satisfaction. “It’s almost the same as the one I use. Thank you.”

“How’d things go with Fury?” Steve asked. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Well, let’s just say it’s been a long night,” said a voice in the kitchen and they both turned to see the operations director in the flesh, leaning against the doorway and sipping a cup of coffee.

“Sir,” Steve said, instinctively drawing to attention, then gesturing toward Bucky. “Sergeant Barnes, sir.”

“So you’re the man who wants me to help you bring down the government,” Fury said, holding out his hand.

“Not all of it, sir,” Bucky said, accepting the handshake. “Just the rotten parts. Thank you for—” he waved vaguely. “Making this happen.”

“You’re going to be the one making it happen, Sarge,” Fury said. “I’m just going to be the one letting you into my office to do it.”

“So let’s hear what you two came up with last night,” Steve said.

“After 9/11, SHIELD built backdoors to every social media site, search engine, and web hosting platform in the world in case we needed to warn the population of an impending nuclear or biological attack,” Natasha said. “Think of it as a 21st century air raid siren.”

“Jesus, that's creepy,” Steve said.

“I can operate the broadcasting application myself,” Fury said. “The hard part is authorizing it.”

“The director of SHIELD can’t access it?”

“Not by myself, I can’t,” Fury said. “The failsafe requires simultaneous retinal scans of at least two Alpha-level directors, like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense or—”

“The Secretary of SHIELD,” Bucky said.

“Yes,” Natasha said. “Like Alexander Pierce.”

“I don’t love where this is going,” Steve said, casting a cautious glance at Bucky.

“The best way we can make sure he sees justice is if he’s already in the room with us when the truth comes out,” Fury said.

Bucky met Steve’s gaze and nodded. “He’s right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

“Good,” Natasha said, lifting a drycleaning bag that was draped over the back of the sofa. “I'm glad you brought your prosthesis with you, because you’ll need to wear this.”

Inside was a SHIELD tac suit, complete with hat, boots, gloves, and ID card. And, Bucky noted with delight, a pair of holsters.

“I’ve got a breakfast with the Joint Chiefs at seven,” Fury said, looking at his watch. “Agent Jim Buchanan has an appointment with me at 9 a.m. sharp. Don’t be late. I’ve got Pierce on my calendar for 9:30 and we need to be ready to go as soon as he arrives.”

Bucky nodded. “Yes sir.”

“And Buchanan,” Fury said as he opened the door. “Cut your hair.”

With a pair of ancient clippers found in the back of the cabinet beneath Sam’s bathroom sink, Natasha and Steve managed to shear him into a passable buzzcut. Bucky gave a resigned frown when he saw it.

“It looks good,” Steve offered lamely. It did look good—but he also knew Bucky’s objection to it wasn’t aesthetic.

“I look like _him_ again,” Bucky said. The believer.

“It’ll grow,” Steve said.

It was a nice thought, that his hair would have time to grow, that what they were doing today wasn’t a suicide mission. That there was an _after_ waiting for them somewhere.

With Bucky’s hair swept up and dumped into the neighbor’s trash, they dressed and washed quickly, everything taking on an eerie quality of potential finality: _This could be the last time I put on socks, brush my teeth, comb my hair, kiss Bucky_. He knew, for a fact, it would be the last time he ever wore his dress uniform. Whatever today brought, he knew Captain America was done forever.

Bucky gave a low whistle when Steve drew on his jacket. “I do love a man in uniform,” he said slyly. Bucky himself was sitting on the bed in an undershirt with the left sleeve cut off, with the upper half of his tac suit pooled around his waist, buckling his prosthetic arm around his chest. Steve watched as he checked the straps and shrugged his shoulders, opening and closing the hand and raising and lowering his elbow.

“Weird, huh?” Bucky said, raising the elbow and pinching the fingers together to show Steve how it worked. The arm wasn’t realistic enough to fool anyone close up, especially the hand, but from a distance it would do.

“Not weird,” Steve said. “Different, maybe.” He nodded as Bucky began to thread the sleeve of his tac suit up the arm and over his shoulder. “How’s it feel?”

“Like I’ve got 10 pounds of dead weight hanging off my shoulder,” Bucky said, shrugging into his right sleeve and standing to zip the suit up. Then he quickly turned and pointed two fingers gun-style at the bathroom wall. The left arm swung away from his body a little as he moved, but not wildly. “Shouldn’t get too much in the way if things get hot.”

After that the rest was quick work: Boots, gloves, cap, guns, and a knife at his ankle for good measure. Steve checked his ribbons and tie and shave. “Do you want to call Becca before we head out?” he asked.

Bucky gave Steve a tight smile and shrugged. “Yeah, but I’m not,” he said. “Takes my head out of the game, you know? Last night was hard enough.”

“Ready, boys?” Natasha asked, letting herself into the bedroom without knocking. She was dressed in uniform as well, and made up so well that there was no trace of her sleepless night left on her face. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daybreak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my God, this chapter was such a fucking bear to write. And rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite a little more this morning. And...anyway, please just stick with it, there is much more story to come.

“Steve, I told you to take a few days,” Maria chided when he walked into her office. “What are you doing here?”

They’d said their goodbyes at Sam’s house—Steve would take his usual route to his office through the Administration Tower around 8, as always, while Bucky would ride in with Natasha and enter through the Operations Tower at a quarter before 9—and Steve felt an unexpected bubble of emotion burst in his throat as he pulled away.

 _This will not be the last time you see him_ , he told himself sternly.

Everyone in D.C. seemed to be driving gray SUVs today, so he couldn’t be sure he didn’t have a tail, but there was little he could do about it because he needed to intercept Maria before her 8:30 a.m. press briefing.

Which he managed to do with 25 minutes to spare.

Steve shut the door behind him. “I need to talk to you about Christine Everhart.”

“Oh, no, Steve,” Maria said. Her face fell a little then, and it reminded Steve what a strange relationship they had with the press sometimes, how they could sometimes be friends and adversaries at the same time. “Did she die? I hadn’t heard—”

“No, she’s still in the ICU, last time I checked,” Steve said. “But you need to know that the reason I was at the same bar was because I’d invited her there. I was trying to feel her out, see what she knew about this sniper story.”

“I never told you to do that, Steve,” Maria said, anger and worry trading places back and forth across her face. “Why on earth did you do that? We have to be very careful around this story. There are things you don’t—”

“I know them, Maria,” Steve said. “Hydra. I know about Hydra.”

“Jesus.” She picked up the phone and dialed an extension. “Hey Sharon, can you cover the morning briefing for me? Something’s come up.” Then she stood and gestured toward the door. “Walk with me.”

Steve followed her out into the atrium, which was teeming with visitors and tour groups this time of morning. The glass and marble box echoed with ambient conversation—making it the perfect place to talk without being overheard.

They ordered their coffee from the lobby cart and made their way to a bench against the wall so they could both keep an eye on who approached them.

“How do you know about Hydra?” she asked.

Steve shook his head. “You first.”

Maria stared at him, thought for a long moment, and decided to trust him. “Ten minutes after I left the initial briefing about the assassinations, I decided to take the stairs back to my office to get some steps in. As I walked past the network closet, I noticed it was ajar, which I never would have noticed if I hadn’t also overheard Jasper Sitwell on the phone inside,” Maria said. “He was asking someone to find out whether someone called ‘the Asset’ was behind some kind of leak, and he ended the call with the words, ‘Hail Hydra,’ which I thought was an extremely fucking weird thing to say.” She smiled brightly and waved at someone she knew walking through the lobby.

She took another sip of coffee. “But I can’t do anything about it just then because I’ve got the 4 p.m. press briefing, so I file it away for later. An hour later, I get back to my office after the briefing to find Sitwell waiting for me with that bullshit statement about the military’s position on targeted political assassinations. I argue with him because if the story’s not true, we should just deny it, but he says no. So I ask him flat-out if this _was_ one of ours, and he said no, but we needed to play coy to keep the story in the news for a while, in case they could force Christine’s source to come out of the woodwork.” She shook her head. “Which I didn’t like at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because after that cloak-and-dagger act of his, I was pretty sure whoever wanted the identity of Christine’s source wasn’t SHIELD,” Maria said. “But I had no way to prove it, and I needed to. Jasper’s been gross to every woman in our office for as long as I’ve known him, and HR’s never done anything about it, no matter how many times we complain, so I knew I couldn’t just level a charge like that at him without incontrovertible evidence.”

“Maria, I had no idea—”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Maria said, waving him off. “So I started looking into Sitwell, reading through his old missions to see if I could figure out what this Hydra thing was. And I— started following him. Last Saturday, I followed him to Potomac Park and watched him make a dead drop underneath a trash can in the parking lot. I waited for an hour to make sure the coast was clear, then grabbed it. It was a USB drive, and I had my laptop in my car, so I popped it in, and the whole file was in Cyrillic. And I couldn’t help but think about those Russian sniper bullets. I knew there had to be a connection.” She put her coffee down and met his eye. “Steve, I think he’s a Russian mole.”

“Did you turn the USB drive over to SHIELD Internal Security?” Steve asked.

“No, I was—I don’t know why, but my gut told me not to. I copied the files and then put the drive back where I’d found it, then waited to see who picked it up.”

“Let me guess,” Steve said. “A white guy about my age driving a gray SUV.”

Maria went a shade paler and nodded. “With brown hair and a big burn scar on his face. Who is he?”

“I have no idea,” Steve said. “But he’s the guy who tried to kill Christine Everhart, and he’s the so-called paparazzi who’s been following me and Bucky all this time.”

“Why you?” Maria asked.

“Not me,” Steve said. “Bucky.”

“Bucky? Why?”

“Because he’s the Asset—or he used to be, I mean—and he was behind the leak, and he’s about to expose Sitwell and everyone he works for,” Steve said, gripping her arm and standing. “And you’re right—the Russians _are_ behind it. That man tried to kill Christine because he was afraid she’d found out this Hydra thing goes all the way to the top.”

Maria’s eyes widened. “Wait, what? Bucky is the Asset? What is the Asset? Was he the one who killed all those people?"

“Would you believe me if I said he’d been brainwashed?”

“I don’t—” Maria shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“I’ve seen the evidence for myself," Steve said urgently. "He’s genuinely devastated. He genuinely wants to expose this. I’m not saying this because I love him, but because I’ve known him all my life and I know he’s telling the truth. But he’s prepared to face a judge. He’s prepared to go to prison if he has to.”

Maria gave him a searching look, deciding whether she could believe him or not. "And what do you mean when you say this goes all the way to the top? Pierce?"

Steve nodded. “Pierce is at the top, but Hydra's got agents all across the government. People at the FCC, CIA, FBI, NSA... Why do you think there haven’t been any photos of me and Bucky together anywhere?” he asked. “Someone's got to be hacking into those accounts, deleting those photos—hell, probably just pickpocketing the tourists and stealing their phones. I think they're doing everything they can make him disappear without calling attention to me or SHIELD.”

“How many moles are we talking about?” she asked. “Twenty? Thirty?”

“In SHIELD alone? Hundreds,” Steve said. “Across the federal government? Thousands.”

Maria gulped. “Jesus Christ.”

"Do you believe me?" Steve asks levelly. 

Maria gave him a hard look. "Yes."

“Do you want to help me stop this?”

She nodded. “I swore an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies. Yes, I’ll help you.”

Steve reached into his pocket and dug a $5 bill out of his money clip, folding it around the USB key he was also carrying. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said, pressing them into her hand. “This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’ll give you the broad strokes and it will have a link that will take you to all the files that will go live at 9:45. I need you to send an embargoed copy of this to the entire Washington press corps, even the international press, bloggers—everyone. At 9:45, post it to SHIELD’s news page and social media. Darcy and Sharon are clean—but for their safety, keep them in the dark until the last minute. Okay?”

“Okay,” Maria said, closing her hand around the key. “What are you going to do?”

“What they built me to do,” Steve said, tossing his unfinished coffee into the trash can. “Fight.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He left Maria at the elevators and took the south tunnel toward the Operations Tower. The Research Tower usually left him feeling like a kid in a science museum, but Ops just made him feel nostalgic—the purposeful bustle of soldiers in uniform, the distinctive thump of boots across the polished concrete floors, the _ten hut_ and the salutes when he entered a room. _I used to be one of you_ , he always wanted to say. Today he hoped he could say, _I still am_.

He straightened his jacket as he stepped into the elevator, more conscious than ever of the gun in the holster beneath his left arm, knowing his service uniform wasn’t cut to accommodate it, knowing anyone who joined him in the elevator will be standing close enough to notice it. He didn’t like guns, which was probably a weird thing to feel when you miss being a soldier—but he never had. They’d always felt vaguely dishonorable to him, and besides, once you’ve seen what one can do to a teenager’s face—

No, he’s not doing this here. He stepped into the back, into the left corner to minimize the exposure, and pressed the button for the top floor. At least his rank gave him access to the express elevator to the command floors, so there would only be six opportunities for someone to join him instead of 50.

He was just about to exhale and enjoy his solitary ride to the top when he heard a familiar voice say, “Hold the elevator,” and Steve’s gut twisted into a knot.

“Yes, sir,” Steve said, putting a quick hand in the door.

“Good morning Captain Rogers,” Secretary Pierce said, entering the elevator. He had his phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and looked for all the world like the busy senior administration appointee that he pretended to be.

“Good morning, Mr. Secretary,” Steve said, returning to his spot on the left side of the elevator.

“I’m sorry about that awful business this weekend with that reporter,” Pierce said as the doors closed. “You must’ve thought you’d left all that behind in Afghanistan.”

“I’m just glad I was able to help, sir,” Steve said.

Pierce reached over to push the button for his floor when he noticed the 50 already lit up. “Are you and I in the same meeting?”

“With Fury, sir?” Steve asked innocently, realizing he had no idea under what pretense Fury had summoned his boss. “Yes. Maria was supposed to take this but something came up so she sent me. I have to admit I don’t even know what it’s for.” He held up his phone sheepishly. “I’m hoping her assistant can send me the briefing materials before we reach the top.”

Pierce laughed warmly. “I admire a man who can admit he’s walking into a meeting with the chief unprepared,” he said. “Well, study up and tell me what you learn when we get there, because I don’t know what this meeting’s about, either.”

“Thank you, sir.” Steve called up a briefing memo from last week about a mission in Azerbaijan and pretended to read it while trying not to watch Pierce out of the corner of his eye. It only took three minutes for the express elevator to reach the top floor, but it felt like an hour had passed by the time the doors opened and deposited them outside Fury’s office.

“Tell Nick I’ll be right in,” Pierce said, nodding toward the men’s room.

“Yes, sir,” Steve said. He debated following him, making sure he didn’t make a run for it, but held himself still. _He can’t possibly know_ , he told himself. _Just stay cool_.

He opened the glass door to Fury’s waiting room and found Natasha sitting in one of the reception chairs, flicking through her tablet as though preparing for her next meeting. Once Pierce was in the office, she was going to send Fury’s receptionist away and guard the door.

She looked up at Steve and nodded as the receptionist waved him in.

“He’s waiting for you, Captain,” she said.

Inside Fury’s office he found Bucky typing away furiously on a SHIELD laptop at the conference table.

“Captain Rogers,” Fury said. “We’re almost ready. Is Hill on board?”

“Yes, sir,” Steve said, checking his phone to see that Maria had cc’d him on every email she’d sent to the Washington press corps. “We’re a go.”

“Seven minutes, sir,” Bucky said, glancing up at the clock on his laptop screen. “You can send the files to Rosenberg at Justice and Diaz at NSA now.”

Fury nodded and leaned over his computer to send the emails. Steve glanced through the window at the helipad out of habit, making sure they didn’t have company. Beyond the Potomac River, Washington spread busily beneath a brilliant blue sky.

It had been a gorgeous day on 9/11, too, he remembered suddenly. He recalled trying to memorize that shade of blue on his way to school, remembered being distracted during first-period trigonometry trying to think about what paints he’d try to mix on his easel to capture it during art class that afternoon. They'd been sent home an hour later, not knowing if they'd ever return.

He jumped slightly when the doorknob turned.

“Sorry I’m late, Nick—” Pierce said as Fury’s assistant pulled the door shut behind her. "Captain Rogers," he said brusquely, nodding at Steve before turning toward Bucky with a quizzical look. “And—I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

“We have, sir,” Bucky said, smiling and stepping forward to shake Pierce’s hand with astonishing composure. “In Krasnoyarsk. Though I don’t think you knew my name then, either. It’s James Barnes, for the record.”

Pierce blinked twice, then gave an open-mouthed smile of recognition as his attention skated down from Bucky’s face to the left arm hanging at a stiff angle by his side. That distracted him just enough for Bucky to draw his gun and point it at him.

“Oh, Nick, you idiot,” Pierce said, raising his hands with a look of indulgent submission that he probably used on a Super Soaker-wielding grandchild. “What did he tell you? We have a mountain of evidence connecting the Asset— _Captain America’s boyfriend_ , for Christ’s sake—to the assassinations in Afghanistan. What do you really think the more likely scenario is? That Cap got hoodwinked, or that everyone else in the world was?”

“We've got a mountain of evidence too, Mr. Secretary, but you’ll just have to stick around and find out,” Nick said humorlessly, calling up the civil defense program onto the enormous monitoring screen mounted on the far wall. “Cap, if you could do the honors?”

Steve moved forward and grabbed Pierce by the collar, clamping him against his chest to immobilize him while Bucky turned back to his computer to begin the upload.

Suddenly gunfire erupted in the reception area. Fury’s door banged open and a tall man with brown hair and a burn scar kicked a badly injured Natasha into the office, who collapsed on the floor. In a fraction of a second, Steve realized she was bleeding profusely from a bullet wound on the left side of her chest and struggling to breathe, and it yanked Steve back to that sidewalk in Georgetown and Christine Everhart.

The intruder was carrying a pistol in each hand and pointed one at Fury and the other at Steve, and in the same instant, Bucky had risen to his feet behind him and drawn his weapon, pointing it at the man.

“Rumlow!” he shouted. “How the fuck are you still alive?”

That startled the man enough to drop the gun he held on Steve and shift his aim to target Fury and Bucky instead.

Steve could feel Pierce’s back crushing the buttons of his uniform jacket into his stomach, reminding him that he wasn’t going to be able to reach his gun quickly enough to use it in time.

“Drop the gun, Buck,” Steve said.

But he just shook his head. “My part’s done,” he said quietly, meeting Steve’s eyes.

“Is it?” Pierce asked. To Rumlow he said, “Talk some sense into him, Crossbones. Make him comply.”

“Shut up,” Steve said.

Rumlow looked directly at Bucky and began to speak to him in slow, steady, insistent Russian. Single words, to Steve's ear, not a sentence. A series of commands, maybe.

“What?” Bucky asked, startled. “No.”

But Rumlow kept talking.

Something changed in Bucky’s posture then. He stood straighter, at attention. His face took on a strange blank quality, but there was terror in his eyes. Confusion, as he looked at his gun. Tears.

“Shut up!” Steve shouted, and he began looking around for a weapon.

“Stop,” Bucky pleaded, but then he lowered the gun slightly and shifted his aim toward Pierce—or Steve? It was impossible to tell.

“Bucky, stop,” Steve ordered. “Whatever he’s telling you is a lie.”

There was a groan by the door as Natasha pulled herself up against the wall, clumsily turning her head toward Bucky and inhaling painfully.

“ _Sputnik_ ,” she rasped, and Bucky dropped to the floor, seemingly unconscious, his gun clattering uselessly beneath the conference table.

“What the fuck?” Rumlow demanded, rounding on Natasha.

The distraction gave Steve just enough time to wrench a whiteboard from the wall one-handed and wing it at Rumlow, neatly cracking his temple with the corner and knocking him—and his aim—sideways.

Steve didn’t even see Fury draw his weapon, he was so fast, but the bullet hole in Rumlow’s cheek was proof enough that he hadn’t lost his touch behind a desk.

“People tend to think I can’t shoot without depth perception,” Fury said grimly, pointing to his eyepatch. “Those people tend to be wrong. Is Barnes okay?”

“Just sleeping, sir,” Natasha gasped breathlessly. “He’ll come to in a minute or so.”

Steve was about to open his mouth to ask Natasha how she’d managed to drop him with a _word_ when the timer on Bucky’s phone began to blare.

They were out of time.

“Get over here,” Steve barked, muscling Pierce up and over to the retinal scanner and pried his eye open with his free hand. “Fury, now.”

Fury stepped up to the second scanner and, after a flash of red, the thing was done. Every screen on the network board went blank, then was replaced by Steve’s face.

_My fellow Americans, I am coming to you today to expose a decades-long plot to infiltrate the United States government and create a global fascist state answering to the Russian Federation. Beginning in 1946, the Soviet Union began to develop a network of sleeper agents—_

“Jesus, Nick,” Pierce said wearily. “You fucking idiot.”

_—evidence of which has been sent to every news outlet in the country, as well as loyal members of the Department of Justice and the National Security Agency. These files are also available for public download at—_

Bucky groaned behind him and he whirled around, Pierce still restrained against his chest.

“Steve,” Natasha said, her voice weak but her tone as urgent as Steve had ever heard from her. “Don’t let him speak to Bucky. Don't let him say the words.”

Steve clamped his hand over Pierce’s mouth. Fury got a roll of duct tape from his desk and together they sealed his mouth and bound his arms and legs.

Steve left him lying on the floor and hurried to Bucky’s side while Fury went to check on Natasha.

He was sitting up now, rubbing his head. “Did we do it?”

“Yeah, baby,” Steve said, pressing his forehead to Bucky’s and kissing him. “We did it.”

Bucky swallowed and nodded, then blinked a few times to clear his vision. “Did I get knocked out?”

“Rumlow started speaking to you in Russian,” Steve said. “You, ah, you kind of pointed a gun at me?”

“What?” Bucky said, horror spreading across his face. He shook his head. “No. Why would I—?”

“Activation words,” Natasha said hoarsely. “To enforce obedience. Soviets were just piloting them before I left. Sometimes things went wrong. _Sputnik_ was like an emergency off switch if the subject got out of control. The only way I could get him to halt the sequence was to put you down. I'm just glad it still worked.”

“You don’t remember any of that?” Steve asked Bucky.

Bucky shook his head. "Not the words, but I could sure as fuck feel what they were doing."

“You wouldn’t remember them,” Natasha said, wincing and hissing and clutching her shoulder again. “Fuck, that stings.”

“Can we trust you now?” Fury asked, turning his gun onto Bucky.

“Um, I'm not sure,” Bucky said. He shook his head and exhaled hard. “I mean, I don’t want to kill any of you, so.”

“I think I stopped it in time,” Natasha said.

Fury set his mouth into a grim line and nodded. He turned to Steve. “Get him as far away from Washington as you can, and if anyone starts speaking Russian to him, you kill them, okay? That’s an order.” He turned back to Natasha and helped her put pressure on her wound. “Natasha and I can handle the cleanup. Just get him the fuck out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” Steve said, helping Bucky stand. “Thank you, sir.”

“Steve, you can’t trust me—”

“Not now,” Steve said, pushing him toward the door. “We have to move.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deep water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: READ THE TAGS. See end note for details if anything is triggering.

It felt like they held their breaths until they crossed the border from Maryland to Pennsylvania.

For as much as neither one of them assumed they would leave Fury’s office alive, Steve couldn’t help but plan for success, too—and that meant they each had a bag of clothes in the back seat and Bucky’s bag of guns and cash in the trunk. Steve hoped they wouldn’t have to use the guns, but the cash would come in handy when it came time to get a motel room.

After pulling over in the woods to exchange their SHIELD uniforms for jeans and t-shirts—and so Bucky could rid himself of the good-for-nothing arm while Steve asked Peggy to join Sam at the cabin in case any Hydra bitter-enders managed to find it—they hit the interstate and headed west, toward Pittsburgh.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Steve asked gently after nearly an hour of silence.

Bucky shook his head and turned to look out the window. “You know what’s crazy? I _mourned_ them when they died. I _grieved_ them. They were my brothers. And seeing Rumlow hold a gun on me—I felt so betrayed.” He rubbed his thumb in anxious circles against his fingertips. “And even so, I feel guilty that he’s dead now. How fucked up is that?”

“Doesn’t make you a bad person,” Steve said.

“But I am, aren’t I? I still belong to them,” he said dully. “Hydra knew if I stepped out of line, all they had to do was say the words, and I’d comply. Even now.”

“You know that for sure?”

Bucky nodded. “I could feel myself getting sucked into this—mindset, I guess—when Rumlow was talking. It was like being dragged underwater and not being able to get free. Hypnotic. I don’t know why, but I was so terrified that I knew I’d do anything they wanted to make it stop. They could make me kill Becca and Lucy. You. Myself. The president. The fear was—I'd never felt anything like it. I'd have done anything,” he said. “It’s like I have a bomb in my head and anyone could set it off.”

“I won’t let them,” Steve said.

“You can’t watch me 24/7 forever,” Bucky said.

“It won’t be forever,” Steve said. “There’s got to be a way to deactivate them. We’ll find it.”

“Steve, you have a _life_ —”

“You’re my life now, Bucky,” Steve said, reaching over and touching Bucky’s cheek, trying not to lose it when Bucky flinched away.

“You can’t trust me,” Bucky said quietly. “I’m not _safe_.”

“Bucky, listen to me,” Steve said. “Remember what I said last night? I love you and I’m not giving up on you. You can’t shake this thing on your own, and if anyone can take care of themselves if you get out of control, it’s me, right? So let me help you. Please.”

“How, Steve?” Bucky asked angrily. “Hide out forever? Never let me talk to a stranger again?”

“Short term, yes,” Steve said. “Short term, we lay low, make sure everyone around you is clean. Long term, we talk to Sam about therapy, medication, maybe other stuff. I don’t know how this works, but I know it’s not something you can fix with a good night’s sleep.”

Bucky shook his head and looked out the window. “I don’t think it’ll work,” he said. “We can try, but I don’t think—”

“Stop,” Steve said. “Let’s end that sentence on ‘we can try,’ okay? Let’s leave it there.”

Bucky turned and gave him a sad smile. “Sure, Stevie,” he said. “We can try.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

They crossed the border into Canada late in the afternoon on the second day, doglegging through a national forest in Minnesota along service roads until they reached a long slash of open ground marked only by a small white obelisk. There was no road on the other side, but they had abandoned the rental in Cleveland and bought a cheap Jeep off Craigslist for cash and knew from the map they’d bought at the gas station that they weren’t too far from a small tourist town.

They treated themselves to a motel that night, a dumpy little vacation lodge not far from Lake Superior, using up all the hot water in the shower and ordering a massive pizza to the room. A quick scan of U.S. news sites showed that their gamble had paid off—Hydra was being purged from the government, though SHIELD had proven to be so badly compromised that President Ellis had ordered it shut down completely and all active missions transferred to the CIA. Otherwise they kept their phones off.

Bucky had barely spoken since they left Washington—not ignoring Steve, but not really engaging outside of what was necessary to discuss their next steps. Steve didn’t push him—the past week had been hell for both of them, but especially Bucky, and he knew he needed some space. Of course, space was impossible to find in the Jeep, or in a hotel room, so silence was the next best thing.

So he was surprised when Bucky cleared the pizza box away and climbed across the bed to kiss him. 

“I don’t want to talk,” Bucky said softly. “I just want to be with you.”

“Okay,” Steve said, his surprise transforming into an urgent hunger.

Kissing and touching, they undressed each other, pausing to admire each other’s bodies with lips and fingertips, pinching and sucking nipples, flicking tongues into navels, feeling the fine sticky film of sweat breaking across each other’s skin.

They were both half-hard by the time their underwear came off, and Bucky took a little time to worship Steve’s dick with his lips and tongue, coaxing him into slick, aching readiness. “Turn over,” Bucky murmured, tapping Steve’s hip. “Let me get the other side, now.”

Steve groaned with delight and did as he was asked, rising up on his knees and elbows, spreading his legs wide to open himself up for Bucky.

“So thoughtful,” Bucky murmured, positioning himself between Steve’s calves and pushing his cheeks just a little further apart with thumbs and fingers.

“Let’s just say I’m highly motivated,” Steve said, then inhaled sharply as he felt Bucky’s tongue draw down between his crease. He lavished Steve’s hole with teasing darts of his tongue but didn’t push inside, and the torment of it made Steve’s dick strain with need.

“You look like you might want something,” Bucky said wryly, applying nibbling kisses to each of Steve’s cheeks.

“Little bit,” Steve moaned, trying not to let his hips buck too much.

“I want you to fuck me,” Bucky said softly.

Steve pulled away and rolled onto his side so he could face him. “Are you sure?”

Bucky nodded, sitting back on his heels and stroking himself hard. “I want you to put your big, wet cock up my ass, and I want to feel you come inside me.”

Maybe this was how he wanted to free himself from them, once and for all, Steve thought. Maybe this was the first step, not erasing the violation but putting it a little further into the past, putting an end to it by giving himself a newer, better, more loving memory to focus on.

“Okay,” Steve said. “You’re in charge. How do you want me?”

“On top of me,” Bucky said a little breathlessly. “I want you to hold me down.”

“Bucky—”

“It’s okay, Steve,” Bucky said, lying down next to him and nuzzling his nose. “I want this. I want to feel how safe I am with you.”

“Okay,” Steve said tentatively. “But you’ll tell me if it turns bad? Promise?”

“Promise,” Bucky said, rolling onto his stomach.

Steve reached for his toiletry kit, sitting on the bedside table, and fished out a small tube of lube he’d tucked inside before they left. He slicked himself up and then squeezed out a fat dollop onto his fingers that he applied with delicate, teasing touches to the rim of Bucky’s hole, determined to make this as painless as he could. Bucky knew it too, because he chuckled softly.

“Such a gentleman,” he teased. “Warming me up like that.”

“You want me to stop?” Steve asked.

“No,” Bucky said, wiggling his ass a little beneath his touch. “It feels nice.”

Steve slipped another finger in, then another, then another, and Bucky opened to take him each time. Bucky was humoring him a little, he realized, making sure _he_ felt comfortable with this, too.

“Ready?” he asked, kissing Bucky’s back.

“For you?” Bucky sighed. “Only since I was 15.”

Steve hummed happily and climbed on top of him and began to push himself in. “You okay?” he asked softly as Bucky gasped.

“Very okay,” Bucky said blissfully.

Slowly, they found their fit and Steve began to move. He could feel the texture of Bucky’s scars against his chest as he slid back and forth across his back. There was a thick one on his shoulder blade that rubbed against his nipple in a fun way, and before he let himself go down some complicated spiral of wondering whether it was good or bad to derive sexual pleasure from a scar, he just decided to go with it.

Bucky was tight and warm around him, with a lazy half-smile on his face and his fingers clamped tight around Steve’s right hand.

“Oh, fuck, that’s good,” Bucky mumbled as Steve began to move faster and harder. The room filled with the sounds of their breathing and the slap and squelch of their bodies as they pushed one another toward pleasure. Steve was losing control of his voice, each breath half a cry, as he drove himself in deeper and deeper, until Bucky was moaning with pleasure too, urging him on—“yes, yes, yes”—until Steve couldn’t stop, it was too much, it was too much, he had to let go, he had to come, and he did with a string of filthy “fucks” so glorious Bucky couldn’t help but grin.

He collapsed against Bucky’s back, breathless and trembling, as Bucky reached back awkwardly to ruffle his hair.

“I love you, Stevie,” he said. “Thank you.”

“It was okay?” Steve mumbled, easing himself out and rolling onto Bucky’s side to face him.

Bucky smiled and nodded. “I’m really glad we did that.”

“Good,” Steve said, leaning in to kiss him.

“I have butt breath,” Bucky protested with a laugh and rolled away, and as he did Steve saw that his stomach was smeared with his own cum.

“I don’t care,” Steve said, going in for the kiss anyway. “Thank you for trusting me,” he said. “I can tell you had fun. Did you feel safe?”

Bucky hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I think I did,” he said. “I had a few moments where I was nervous, but I was never scared, which—that’s a lot for me. So yeah, it was nice.”

“Good,” Steve said, kissing his nose. “But for the record, I don’t need to fuck to be happy. I don’t. I just like being with you however you want to be with me, so don’t ever feel like it’s something you have to do. Hell, you could fuck me if you wanted to—I like it that way, too.”

“Maybe I’ll let you tie me up one day.”

“Mmm,” Steve hummed, snuggling in close and kissing him again. “That could be fun.”

Bucky palmed some of the sticky cum from his belly. “I’m gonna shower again and then sleep for a year,” he said.

“Deal,” Steve said, sitting up with him. “Mind if I join you?”

“For the shower or the sleeping part?”

Steve yawned and grinned. “Both.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Steve startled awake around 3 a.m. to the knowledge that he was alone in the bed. And—he quickly touched Bucky’s pillow, and found it cool—had been for a while.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized that Bucky wasn’t in the bathroom, either—the door was open and the light was off—but he checked anyway, and looked inside the closet, too.

“Fuck,” he said aloud, quickly dressing and grabbing the room key from the table, realizing as he did that Bucky hadn’t taken it with him. That made him even more nervous. The Jeep was still there, at least, which meant he couldn’t have gone far.

Instinct took him toward the lake, half a mile down the road. He jogged, then ran full-tilt down the darkened blacktop, hoping he wouldn’t encounter any deer or bears or wolves or whatever else roamed the forests at night. There was a mostly full moon, at least, and the sky was clear.

The road gave out onto a broad gravel parking area and a concrete boat ramp. Lake Superior stretched endlessly ahead, glittering in the moonlight. Overhead there were more stars than Steve could ever remember seeing outside of Afghanistan.

A small dark spot in the water caught his eye, and he realized it was a person wading, nearly chest-deep in the water. A person with only one shoulder, one arm.

“Bucky!” Steve shouted, kicking off his shoes. As he did, he noticed Bucky’s clothes from earlier that day folded neatly at the top of the boat ramp, sitting on top of his sneakers, with his wallet perched on top, open to his driver's license. “Bucky!”

Bucky was trying to ignore him, he could tell, but his back stiffened, so Steve knew he’d heard him. Steve quickly shucked his clothes and followed Bucky into the water—Christ, it was _freezing_ —and closed the distance as quickly as he could.

“Bucky, come back!” he called as he pushed through the water. “What are you doing?”

“Leave me alone, Steve,” Bucky warned, half-turning back to him. “Let me go.”

“The hell I will,” Steve said, catching up to him and grabbing his shoulder.

“Don’t,” Bucky shouted, pulling his arm free and backing away. “Why did you have to come looking for me?”

“Of course I’m going to come looking for you,” Steve said helplessly. “What are you doing?”

Bucky shrugged. “Nice night for a swim.”

“Were you planning to come back from that swim, Buck?” Steve asked angrily. “Or were you just going to see how far you could go till you drowned?”

Bucky’s face crumbled then, and he shook his head. “I didn’t want you to find me,” he said.

“You mean you didn’t want me to _be the one who_ found you,” Steve said. “Is that it? Is that why you wanted me to fuck you tonight? Was it your way of saying goodbye?”

Bucky swallowed, the unspoken _yes_ playing across his face. “I can’t do it, Steve,” he said, shaking his head again. “I’m too dangerous. It’s better this way.”

“No, it’s not,” Steve said urgently. “In no version of this story is this the better way, do you understand me? It isn’t. It never will be.”

Bucky looked tentatively out at the open water. “It’s easy, drowning,” he said. “They did that to me, in Russia. They would drown us and revive us, over and over again. It’s scary at first, but then you just—I don’t know. You just let go, and it’s not that bad. Because you let go. You just let the water into your lungs, and you go to sleep.”

Steve felt a sob bubble up in his throat. “Bucky,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t do this. I can’t let you. Don’t make me drag you back. Don’t make this a fight.” He waded a little closer and reached out his hand. “Because I will fight, if I have to. I’ll fight for you till the day I die.”

Bucky turned back and looked at him with an expression of distant surprise. “Why?” he asked. “I murdered 23 people. Why do I get a happy ending when they can’t?”

“I don’t know,” Steve admitted. “But I do know that it wasn’t you pulling the trigger. I know they made you do it. I know they used you. And I know you don’t believe it yet, but you will, Bucky. I know one day you will believe that it wasn’t your fault.”

Bucky gave Steve a sad smile. “No I won’t,” he said. “I’ll never believe that. I know they brainwashed me, but I will also know it was me who killed those people for the rest of my life.”

“Then let me help you live with it, Bucky,” Steve said. “Let me help you _live_ with it.”

Bucky looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t know if I can,” he said plaintively.

“I’ll help you,” Steve said, extending his hand a little further. “Bucky, please. Let me help you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said softly.

“We don’t have to talk about forever,” Steve said. “Let’s just—talk about tonight, okay? Will you come back with me tonight?”

Bucky gave three quick, jagged breaths, then swallowed, and then nodded. “Okay,” he said hoarsely, taking Steve’s hand. He was shivering, and Steve pulled him into his arms to warm him. “I’ll try.”

Steve cried a little then, holding him tightly as the water lapped at their ribs. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Depiction of a suicide attempt, reference to torture. 
> 
> \---
> 
> I'm grateful for your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Safehouse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Brief description of torture. (This chapter is not as rough as the previous one).

The next morning, Steve turned the car east, back toward home, and Bucky didn’t argue. He didn’t say much of anything at all, his silence taking on a new fretful, jittery quality that Steve couldn’t read very well. He was afraid now, that much was clear—not of Steve but of himself, and Steve did everything he could to stay calm and steady around him, even though he cried in the shower every night when they stopped to rest.

At night they slept huddled together like soldiers in a foxhole, too tired for more than a goodnight kiss and a squeeze. But they took comfort in each other’s touch, in each other’s warmth, and though Bucky awoke with a nightmare every night, they seemed to be less painful than the one he’d had at Sam’s, less frightening. Steve hoped that meant something inside him was starting to lift.

Steve began having nightmares too. Bucky’s mention of being drowned during his indoctrination hauled up Steve’s memory of everything else he’d read in that Hydra file. There hadn’t been any photos, but in his sleep his mind filled in the blanks readily enough. His dreams were peppered with images of Bucky being beaten and electrocuted with a car battery with a suffocating hood over his head, of being drowned over and over again in a sink full of filthy water, of being held for days in a freezing box so small he couldn’t stand up or turn around, of spending over a week in a brilliantly lit room blaring heavy metal so loud he couldn’t sleep, until he was sobbing and hallucinating so badly he didn’t know his own name.

His nightmares were apparently silent ones, because he’d wake up gasping and sweating to find Bucky still asleep beside him. He’d curl up around him more tightly and Bucky would grasp his arm and eventually his heart would slow down enough for him to rest again.

They hugged the shoreline as Lake Superior gave way to Lake Huron, and then headed east toward Ottawa and then Montreal, where they turned south, crossing back into the United States on a dark country road late on their fifth night. After a few hours’ rest outside Plattsburgh they skimmed south along the shores of Lake Champlain, then Lake George, then the Hudson River—Steve felt a sharp pain of nostalgia when they reached it, the river they’d grown up with, the river that could take them all the way back to New York City if they wanted.

Someday.

“Almost there,” Steve said as they exited the interstate at Saugerties and turned west again. His nerves were starting to frizzle with anticipation—he’d only spent a four or five weeks in his cabin all told, mostly long weekends here and there to fix it up or supervise repairs, but it had long since taken on a mythical homelike quality, and he was anxious to finally sleep in a bed he could call his own. “Just a couple more hours.”

Bucky nodded and scrubbed at his hair, then smoothed his t-shirt a little. They were both scruffy and rumpled—neither one of them had shaved since Washington, and their clothes bore all the usual signs of having been hastily stuffed into a bag—but it was hard to care too much about that.

“Don’t tell her what I did,” Bucky said softly, not looking at him. It was the first time he’d spoken of the lake since it had happened.

“Okay,” Steve said. “But only if you promise to talk to Sam about it.”

Bucky nodded. “I’m sorry I did that to you,” he said.

“I’m sorry you did it to yourself,” Steve said.

“I’m okay now,” Bucky said, though Steve couldn’t help but think he was trying to convince himself as much as Steve. “I just—lost my nerve back there. For a minute. But I got it back.”

“You’re still talking to Sam about it,” Steve said. "Get that referral from him. You need professional help."

He nodded. “I will.”

Steve reached over and squeezed his shoulder, and Bucky reached up and covered Steve’s hand with his for a minute.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to eating something that doesn’t come from a drive-thru,” Steve said, returning his hand to the wheel.

“I want to go for a run,” Bucky said. “A really long one. I don’t ever want to sit again.”

Steve laughed softly. “There are some good trails by the house,” he said. “One goes all the way to the top of the mountain. Get up there in time for the sunrise—nothing can beat that view.”

Bucky gave him a tired but genuine smile. “Sounds like a date,” he said.

“You got it,” Steve said.

He thought he would be tired of driving winding back roads through the woods, but he wasn’t, and the three miles from the small village where Steve kept a mailbox were probably the prettiest stretch of woods he’d ever seen. He’d always thought of himself as a city boy, and he was, but after a decade at war he found that what he wanted most was to surround himself with living, growing things.

And then they were home.

Steve turned into the driveway, a quarter-mile of gravel that bore them through the thinning woods to the large wooden house and the lake beyond.

Sam was the first to open the door, gun in hand, to investigate the newcomers. They saw his face change from challenge to joy as he realized who they were, and he shoved the gun into the back of his waistband and shouted inside.

It was pandemonium then, Peggy and Becca running out to meet them, Lucy bouncing along in Becca’s arms. Steve and Bucky piled out of the car, Steve into Peggy’s hug and Bucky into Becca’s.

“That was quite a stunt you pulled off, Steven,” Peggy chided, slapping Steve’s arm.

“Thank you, Peg,” he said, hugging her again. “Oh, God, Peg, it’s so good to see you.”

“I love you, you idiot,” she said, leaning into his shoulder. “You saved my life how many times?”

“I lost count,” Steve teased.

“Glad to see you in one piece, Cap,” Sam said, offering his hand. "All quiet here."

“Sam,” Steve said, shaking his hand and then pulling him into a hug. “I can’t thank you enough for what you did for them.”

Sam shook his head. “Compared to what you guys did? This was nothing.”

“I think Bucky would disagree,” Steve said.

They both turned to see Bucky press kisses to Becca’s and Lucy’s cheeks, gratefully accepting Lucy into his arms when she reached for him. She was patting his beard and chatting away excitedly as Becca pulled him close into another tearful hug, not letting go until Bucky reassured her he was okay.

He set Lucy down and turned to Sam, offering him a hug in turn. “Thank you,” he said softly. “They’re my world.”

“Thank you for trusting me with them, man,” Sam said. “Just glad I could help you do what you needed to do.”

“Got time for a longer conversation later?” Bucky asked. “I might be ready to take you up on that thing you suggested.”

Sam gave him a searching look, then smiled. “About time you asked.” 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

They spent the rest of the day relaxing on the lake shore. Lucy loved the water, and Steve and Bucky took her out with her water wings and supervised her swimming while Becca and Peggy relaxed in the sun and Sam napped the afternoon away in the hammock.

‘Supervising’ Lucy’s swimming mostly meant Bucky carrying her around on his hip or back, but it was hard to mind. She was in a good mood, sweetly chattering about this and that, and Bucky and Steve took turns telling her stupid jokes that made her screech with laughter.

She was far more put off by Bucky’s short hair and beard than his missing arm or his scars, Steve noticed. She was too young to remember him any other way, he realized, and as far as she was concerned, Bucky was as he was always meant to be. And Bucky loved her intensely, he could tell—it was a delight to watch him with her because he always gave her his full attention and she gave him hers—and Steve couldn’t help but imagine that he was watching Bucky with his own daughter. Maybe even theirs one day, if he wanted to get way, way, way ahead of himself.

Then Lucy wanted to show off her swimming and paddled the few yards from Bucky’s arm to Steve’s, and Steve convinced her to hang off of him for a while to give Bucky a break. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held a child—Afghanistan, he knew, probably on one of the Howlies’ relief missions, and he wondered what they thought about what he’d done, if they knew about it at all yet.

“Are you Bobo’s boyfriend?” Lucy asked. “Boyfriends kiss.”

Steve glanced at Bucky and grinned. “Yeah, I am.”

“Do you love him a whole lot?”

Steve laughed. “Yes, I love him a whole lot,” he said. “Maybe as much as you.”

“No, I love him the most,” Lucy said, with implacable confidence. “But you can love him too.”

“Okay,” Steve said, ruffling her hair. “I’d like that.”

“You’re okay,” she decided.

“I’m _okay_ ,” Steve said to Bucky, who laughed and swam in close and gently pried Lucy away.

“Let me see your fingers, Lucy Monster,” he said, and when she showed him, he made a comical frowny face. “All wrinkled. Time for a nap.”

He carried his niece out of the lake and deposited her between Becca and Peggy before rejoining Steve in the water.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hey,” Steve said, swimming toward him and taking Bucky’s hand. “I like this version of being together in a lake better.”

Bucky gave him a tight little smile and looked out across the water, to the thickly wooded mountains that rose up on the other side, and his smile softened. “Me too,” he said, and Steve believed him. “It’s not over, though,” he said. “Me and this—thing. I can feel it inside me. Now that I know it’s still there—”

“I know.”

“I want everyone to leave in the morning,” Bucky said, a little sadly. “I don’t want to be near anyone until these words are out of my head.”

“We can do that.”

An anxious, fretful look crossed Bucky’s face and Steve pulled him in close for a hug. “Remember what I told you. I’m going to help you get out of this, okay?”

He felt Bucky nod against his shoulder. “I’m sorry I keep talking about it like—like it’s something new each time. It’s just that every time it hits me, it feels like an emergency, you know? And I have to warn you.”

“I know,” Steve said. “You can tell me as many times as you need to. My answer’s always going to be the same.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After dinner, while Becca was putting Lucy to bed, Steve and Peggy took big mugs of tea out to the sofa on the porch while Bucky and Sam sat on the bench by the lake to talk.

“He’s in bad shape,” Steve said. “Trying to hide it, but he is.”

“No wonder,” Peggy said. “But Sam’s a good man. Just—amazing, really. He'll make sure Bucky is in the right hands.”

Something in her voice made Steve crack a sly smile. “I see how it is.”

Peggy shrugged and smiled. “You know, tight quarters, stressful circumstances,” she said. “Or maybe not. I really like him.”

Steve laughed softly. “When do you have to go back to London?”

“Well, MI6 have fired me for insubordination, so I’m a bit at loose ends. To be honest, I’m lucky I wasn’t charged with treason,” she said. “I think I’m just going to take some time to consider my options.”

Steve nodded toward Sam. “Thinking about staying in America?”

Peggy shrugged. “For a little while, anyway,” she said. “Thought maybe I could keep an eye on your place while you’re up here.”

“One condition: Pour out the scotch as soon as you get there.”

Peggy sipped her tea. “I’ll even get Sam to witness it so you know it’s done.”

Steve rested his arm around her shoulders and she snuggled in next to him. As she did, the porch light struck the scarred dent in her thigh where part of the muscle had been removed. The limp was never going away, he realized. The war had broken them all, in small ways and large, and it had all been for nothing.

He thought about Junior and Riley and the teenage boy in the village outside Jalalabad—

No. He wasn’t ready to think about that, yet.

He had no illusions that the wars would end anytime soon, either. There was too much instability in the region now—cracks that coalition forces couldn’t in good conscience allow to widen. Doing the right thing to fix it was going to cost just as much.

Steve could go back, if he wanted to. Still felt on some level that he should, that he still had something to contribute over there, an obligation to fix what they’d broken. But that was mostly his pride talking. He watched Bucky and Sam talking on the bench, Bucky’s guarded posture, the way he wouldn’t look Sam in the eye, and knew he couldn’t leave—not ever. His life was here now, with him.

Did either of them deserve a happy ending after what they’d done? After all the lives they’d taken? Steve wondered about that, wondered about what was right and just and fair. And yet here was Sam, giving all the good he could give to the world, and Peggy pulling her life together and risking her future to help save a country that wasn’t even hers. Maybe there was a way to balance the scales. Maybe there was still good he could do.

 _Moral injury_. This must have been what Sam had been talking about, the low, panicky guilt of it all that followed him constantly, like a ringing in his ears. He’d guarded it jealously for so long—somehow the guilt made him feel better, like he was getting what he deserved, that he didn’t deserve kids of his own, that he didn’t deserve a family or love or friends—and yet here it all was, anyway.

Becca opened the screen door and joined them on the porch with a glass of wine, taking a seat in the chair by the sofa. Steve followed her gaze out to the bench by the lake, a soft, protective look on her face when she turned back toward him and said, “Take care of him for us, Stevie.”

Steve nodded. “I will.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An hour later Steve and Bucky were alone in the master bedroom, quietly undressing and washing up for the night. It was painful in its ordinariness, Steve thought, just a couple getting ready for bed after everything that had happened, everything they had done.

Bucky was sitting on the bed in his undershorts, leaning on his arm, when Steve returned from the bathroom.

“Hey, babe,” Steve said, bending over to give him a kiss as he tossed his phone lightly onto the nightstand. He sat down next to him and pulled him into a sideways hug, kissing his temple. “We made it.”

“How long can we stay?” Bucky asked.

“As long as we need to,” Steve said. “Forever, if you want. We’ll figure it out.”

Bucky nodded. “Sam's going to set me up with shrink he knows,” he said quietly. “She’s a trauma expert, does a lot of work with cult survivors. She’s in D.C. but Sam says she does video sessions.”

“Good,” Steve said. “How do you feel about it?”

Bucky shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I trust Sam though.”

“Nervous?” Steve asked

Bucky set his jaw, almost shook his head, then changed his mind and nodded. “He said it would get harder before it got better,” he said, then laughed softly. “Fair warning.”

“Okay,” Steve said, kissing him again. “Consider me duly warned.”

Bucky exhaled raggedly and tried to blink back a few tears. “Fuck,” he said. “I don’t know if I can do it, Stevie.”

“You can,” Steve said, squeezing him tight. “And I’ll be right here with you, okay? I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

Bucky turned and kissed him then, long and slow and sweet. Steve softened into the kiss, reaching up to caress Bucky’s softly bearded cheek.

Bucky got up onto his knees to face him, kissing more deeply now, skimming his hand down Steve’s chest and pinching the first nipple he found, worrying it between his finger and thumb till it was sending delicious shocks of pleasure through his chest.

Steve moaned a little, and Bucky let his hand trail further south, over Steve’s boxers and massaged his cock through the soft fabric.

Steve responded by catching Bucky’s lip between his teeth and sucking gently before plunging his tongue into his mouth. He ran his hands up and down Bucky’s back, plucking at the waistband of his boxers and sliding his hand down inside to cup his ass. Bucky hummed happily against his mouth and Steve’s breath guttered when Bucky gave his cock a suggestive squeeze.

“Take these off,” Steve said, tugging at the fabric of Bucky’s shorts.

Bucky stepped off the bed to undress while Steve took care of his own underwear, then stood in front of Steve, cock half-hard and looking for more, and toed his legs apart.

Steve obliged and made a low happy moan as Bucky dropped to his knees on the carpet and planted slow, sucking kisses up Steve’s thigh. The brush of Bucky’s beard was doing excruciatingly delicious things to the soft skin there, and Steve made a small impatient noise when Bucky pulled away before reaching his cock. Bucky grinned and gave a soft humming laugh, then turned to his other leg and granted it the same sweet torture.

“You’re never shaving,” Steve said, hissing as Bucky found a particularly sensitive spot. He reached forward to stroke Bucky’s hair and play with his ear, pinching the lobe and trailing his fingernails along the sensitive skin behind it.

Bucky rewarded him by taking his cock into his mouth this time, sucking him slowly, leisurely, with no intention of letting him get off anytime soon. Steve sighed raggedly as pleasure rose through his body. Bucky reached up and began to play with his balls, massaging them in his hand and stroking the skin behind them.

“Oh, God, Buck,” Steve said breathlessly.

He became too uncoordinated to keep stroking Bucky’s ear, so he just gathered fistfuls of bedclothes in his hands instead, spending all of his dwindling concentration on trying not to fuck Bucky’s mouth too hard. A fine sweat had broken out across his chest, and he felt himself beginning to fall apart.

“I’m close,” he gasped softly, and Bucky stopped for a moment, looking up at him with the most maddeningly insouciant expression Steve had ever seen him make, and for a moment his heart soared to see a glimpse of the playful affection Bucky had doled out so generously before everything went to hell.

With a frustrated little laugh, Steve started thrusting into the air, bumping the tip of his cock against Bucky’s lower lip. “Oh Christ, Bucky,” Steve pleaded. “I gotta come.”

“Do it inside me,” Bucky said, pulling away and reaching for the nightstand. As he stood, he could see Bucky was already hard, and the sight of his cock standing out erect sent a fresh jolt of desire through him.

Steve did times tables in his head while Bucky slicked him up so he wouldn’t come right there and then.

“Help me sit on you,” Bucky said, straddling Steve’s lap.

Bucky curled his arm around Steve’s neck as Steve supported his back with one hand and guided Bucky onto his cock with the other.

They both sighed raggedly as he sank down toward Steve’s thighs. Bucky’s cock pushed insistently against Steve’s belly, flooding him with a wild, soaring burst of lust, and he began to roll his hips.

Bucky groaned as Steve found his sweet spot, and the sound only pushed Steve further on. He tipped his head up to kiss him, to let Bucky suck and nibble on his lip the way he liked to do, and then, when Bucky forgot how to kiss, simply gazed up at him as they fucked. He loved seeing Bucky’s face like this, loved watching his lips part and his pupils flare, loved hearing his quick, shallow breath in his ear, loved feeling his dick push against his belly.

“Oh, God, Buck, the things you do to me—” he said, slowing down for a little while to make it last. He grinned when Bucky gave him an impatient whine and began to push himself harder against Steve’s belly. His dick was getting wet and the feeling of it shoved Steve over.

“Buck—” he gasped, thrusting uncontrollably. “I’m gonna—Buck, I want you to come with me—I wanna—Buck—”

Bucky let out a soft, delicious cry and his legs began to jerk a little beneath his weight. His mouth opened further and his eyebrows lifted as his climax approached. “Fuck, yes, Stevie—I need—fuck—I’m gonna—I’m gonna—Stevie—fuck—” he mumbled, before words failed and he all he could do was moan as he spattered their bellies with cum.

He let out a long ragged sigh, and they sat together for a moment or two longer, just holding one another as their adrenaline drained away.

After Bucky climbed off, Steve reached behind himself to grab his shorts, left behind on the bed from when they undressed, and used them to mop himself and Bucky clean.

“Full service,” Bucky murmured with a soft smile.

“Only the best for my best guy,” Steve said, planting a kiss on his nose, and then his mouth.

“You take good care of me, Stevie,” Bucky said.

“Because I love you,” Steve said, tossing the shorts aside. He snuggled up close to Bucky and clasped his hand against his chest. “And I’m never letting you go.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And then the cabin was empty, except for them. They spent the day quietly cleaning up, washing sheets, tidying the destruction Lucy had left in her wake. She had left them nearly three dozen pictures—Bucky chose six for the fridge and Steve put the rest into a folder that he tucked into the drawer of Bucky’s nightstand. Sam had left them with a ton of food, so they made casseroles, chopped veggies, and portioned meat to freeze for later.

They didn’t talk much—it had been hard to watch everyone they loved drive away that morning, and even Steve was feeling a little shaky about the prospect of remaining out here, alone, indefinitely. But until the last of Hydra was mopped up, Bucky refused to take the risk.

A text from Natasha—from the hospital, no less—told Steve the purge was going apace. Bucky would have to debrief the intelligence community eventually, but not until they could be sure every last member of Hydra had been accounted for. In the meantime, Bucky would have time to heal.

It felt good to set the cabin to rights, to arrange it to their liking and make it their home. Bucky insisted on claiming one of the extra bedrooms as his own in case he had a bad night, and Steve tried not to bristle at the precaution. But if it made Bucky feel better to know it was there, to know he had a comfortable place to pass a sleepless night without bothering Steve (Steve wanted to be bothered, wanted to ride out the bad nights with him, didn’t want him ever to feel alone) then he would live with it.

Bucky had to be in control of his recovery, Sam had told him privately that morning. Steve’s job was to keep him safe and supported and loved, and sometimes that would mean reminding him to do the things he needed to do, but unless he hurt himself or someone else, Bucky needed to have the final say.

“You’re going to want to throttle him sometimes,” Sam said. “What he wants isn’t always going to make sense to you. Trust that it will make sense to him.”

So they cleaned the cabin and prepped their food. They took a long run along the lake shore, and Bucky napped in the hammock while Steve sketched him, trying to capture a moment of Bucky at peace before—well, before everything that was still to come, he supposed. It had been months—years, maybe—since he’d tried to sketch anything more elaborate than a doodle, and he was pleased to discover how much muscle memory he’d retained.

That night Bucky grilled a couple of steaks and Steve made some salad and a couple of baked potatoes and they ate on the porch overlooking the lake with a pair of sweating bottles of beer.

“Two months ago, would you have ever thought we’d be here now?” Bucky asked, clinking his beer bottle to Steve’s and then taking a long drink. 

“I hoped I’d see you again one day,” Steve said. “I think part of me has always been looking for you.”

“Bet this wasn’t what you expected to find,” Bucky said with a soft laugh, gesturing at his chest with his fork. His laugh was wry, but not bitter.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Steve said, reaching over to clasp Bucky’s hand. “But I’m really glad I found you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The torture Bucky endured comes directly from the United States' official records on enhanced interrogation. I did not have to make any of that up. 
> 
> Please note that the next chapter is a really hard one. (The hardest in the whole story, recovery isn't linear, etc etc.) The happy ending IS coming, I promise, but these guys have been through a lot and have to process it. So please make sure you read the tags and are in a good place to read before you start, and know that the sun is gonna rise in the end. 
> 
> \---
> 
> I'm grateful for your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rock bottom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi. As I mentioned at the end of the last chapter, this chapter is a really, really hard one. PLEASE READ THE TAGS and see the endnotes for specific content warnings if any of them are triggering. Please also keep in mind that one of the tags is also "Happy Ending," and I mean it. 
> 
> xoxo

“Hey babe,” Steve said, looking up from his sketch when he heard Bucky’s steps on the stairs. They’d turned one of the upstairs bedrooms—the one that had been Lucy’s—into his therapy room, furnished with a big, soft velvet sofa they’d found at the thrift store in the village, a stack of soft pillows and blankets, and a white noise machine. “How’d it go?”

Bucky’s eyes were red and his shoulders were a little slumped, and his tiny shrug told Steve everything he needed to know.

“Why don’t you lie down,” he said, lifting the soft blanket they kept on the sofa for this purpose. “I’ll get you some tea.”

It had been three weeks since Bucky began seeing his new psychiatrist, a compassionate, no-nonsense woman named Jenny. Steve had met her briefly at the beginning of their first session—just long enough to say hello, to put a name to the face, and to help him understand what to expect as Bucky began his work.

Bucky and Jenny would meet three times a week to begin with. There would likely be medication for his sleep, for his mood, for his anxiety, for emergencies. He might gain weight, she said, feel his thoughts cloud, or lose his libido for a while. There would be homework—lots of it, some of it harder than he ever imagined. He would have bad days, sometimes terrible ones as he worked through his trauma. He would from time to time feel like he was losing hope. Jenny warned them of this. She also said that he would, with time, get better.

When Jenny had dismissed Steve that first day, he’d found it took more effort than he expected to shut the door and go back downstairs. It was terrifying to think of Bucky confronting it all alone.

But he did.

He was always drained afterward, though—and today was no different.

Bucky didn’t like to be touched after his sessions, so Steve let him tuck himself in on the sofa. It was a warm day already, but Bucky never seemed to care—hypothermia had been one of Hydra’s favorite tools, so he always gravitated toward heat after he talked about them.

Steve brought him a big mug of the chamomile tea Bucky liked and set it on the coffee table in front of him. But he didn’t touch it—he was already lying down, his hand tucked beneath his head, his gaze already becoming more vacant.

“Baseball or movie?” Steve asked softly, reaching for the remote. “Mets are playing the Phillies right now. Bottom of the third. I also rented _Pacific Rim_.”

“Baseball,” Bucky murmured. “Movie after dinner.”

“You got it,” Steve said, switching on the game.

Bucky nodded his thanks, and Steve picked up his book and assumed his usual station in the recliner across from the sofa, where Bucky could see him easily if he needed reassurance. Then he pretended to read and watched Bucky pretend to watch the game as he slipped away into whatever world he went to while his mind recovered from whatever scab he’d had to pick off that day.

When the game ended, Bucky got up wordlessly and went to the kitchen for a few cookies—the pills had given him a monumental sweet tooth, and Steve had taught himself to bake in order to keep Bucky in supply—and then went to the bathroom to take a shower. Steve straightened the sofa and drank the untouched lukewarm tea before carrying it into the sink and opening the fridge to consider dinner.

By the time Bucky emerged, hair wet and already cozy in a t-shirt and sweatpants, Steve had pulled out the fixings for chili. They worked easily together in the kitchen, Steve chopping veggies and Bucky manning the skillet, browning everything before dumping it into the pot with the tomatoes and beans. Bucky had barely said a word, and his jaw was clenched, but Steve could tell he was trying to be present and didn’t push him. 

Once the chili was on the stove, Steve whipped up some cornbread, too—why stop at cookies?—and Bucky sat down at the table to work on his new puzzle.

It was a fiendishly difficult 5,000-piece puzzle of a deep-field photo of the universe from the Hubble Space Telescope that took up most of the dining table. Bucky had bought it to occupy himself during panic attacks, because Jenny said he needed a distraction when he felt one coming on, but he found he often liked to work on it on therapy days, too. Said it made him feel a little bit less like everything was falling apart.

Except when it didn’t.

Something—some impatient noise, maybe—made Steve look up from the bowl of batter across the breakfast bar at him. Bucky was leaning over the middle of the puzzle awkwardly, trying to support himself on his elbow as he unpicked a wrong piece from the segment he’d tried to attach it to. It was one of those annoying almost-fits, the kind you can’t tell is wrong till you fit it in and see the gaps.

“I shoulda known it should have gone in easier,” he muttered, trying to free the piece without dragging half the puzzle up with it. “Jesus, how did I manage to _do_ this?”

“Want a hand?” Steve asked.

“Yes, Steve, I would really fucking like another hand,” Bucky snapped, yanking the piece up. It brought up more than a dozen pieces with it, and he angrily tried to shake the wrong piece free, breaking the whole section apart and scattering them back in among the unmatched pieces in the center of the table. “Fuck!” he shouted, dragging the entire completed section off the table. “God _damn_ it!”

“Buck—” Steve said softly, moving around the breakfast bar, hoping against hope Bucky couldn’t tell how hard his heart was pounding at his distress.

“Don’t _stare_ at me!” Bucky shouted.

“Bucky, I’m not—” Steve started. “I can tell you’re frustrated. How can I help?”

 _Please tell me how to help_ , he didn’t say aloud. _Please tell me I’m not completely useless against this_.

“I don’t need your fucking help, Steve. I need my fucking hand back.”

Steve let the impossibility of that sit untouched between them. He briefly wondered whether this actually had anything to do with his arm at all, then decided it didn’t matter. Just because he’d accepted the loss didn’t mean he wasn’t entitled to bitch about it when it got in his way, and just because he’d never done it in front of Steve didn’t mean it had never happened before. Besides, even though Bucky didn’t use much in the way of adaptive equipment around the house—mostly kitchen stuff—they’d fled Washington without any of it, and Steve figured all those cumulative little frustrations were bound to overflow sometime. And he was already so raw right now—

“I know it’s hard,” he said, realizing even as the words came out he’d said the wrong thing.

“You don’t know shit,” Bucky said, pushing past him and storming outside to the deck.

Steve switched the exterior lights on and watched through the kitchen window as Bucky sat down on the top stair, cradled his head in his arm, and began to shake. Every muscle in Steve's body wanted to run to him, to hold him and tell him everything would be okay, but it was clear enough that Bucky wanted to be alone for a little while.

So he finished the cornbread instead, glancing out the window every few minutes to make sure Bucky was still there, and then took a chance and went outside to join him.

If Bucky had been crying, he wasn’t anymore. Instead he looked almost haunted as he stared out at the lake.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said.

“You’re allowed to be frustrated,” Steve said.

“The head of the VA was Hydra,” Bucky said. “I don’t know if you spotted her name on the list. And for some reason, today I got it in my head that maybe she’d engineered things somehow so that I’d have no choice but to cut off my arm and go back to work for them. Like maybe she got to my doctor, and made him—” He shook his head. “It’s crazy, I know.”

“Not that crazy,” Steve said. “It’s hard not to be a little paranoid when you uncover a massive government conspiracy.”

“I passed along six leads to them while I was at the CIA,” Bucky said. “Two of them were names. Those people died because of me, and they never would have if I hadn’t gone through with the amputation. And I can’t help but wonder if they just wanted to find a way for me to keep killing for them.”

“You couldn’t spend the rest of your life on pain pills, taking care of a wound that was never going to heal, Buck,” Steve said. “Whether Hydra was holding the scalpel or not, you didn’t have a choice.”

Bucky just shook his head and stared out at the lake. “Jenny said this was going to bring up a lot of shit, and she wasn’t kidding.”

Steve slid his arm around Bucky’s back. “I love you,” he said, kissing the side of his head.

Bucky nodded and leaned his head against Steve’s.

“I hate this,” he said softly. “I hate being like this.”

“I know,” Steve said. “But I’m always gonna be here for you, okay? Whatever you need, it’s yours.”

Bucky nodded. “Rub my shoulder?” he asked.

Steve dug his fingers into the iron-hard muscles of his left shoulder, feeling them twitch and jump as they tried to fight the pressure of the massage. Bucky winced and then sighed.

After a few minutes, Bucky began to relax against him, and Steve started to relax a little as well. The fireflies began to rise from the ground and the crickets began to sing. A little frog at the edge of the lake was crying out for sex and a flock of owls roosting in one of the trees near the south side of the house began to have an animated conversation so insistent that it made Bucky huff a soft laugh.

“It’s a pretty night,” Steve said, glancing up at the stars. “We should bring the telescope out later.”

Bucky nodded. “Okay, baby,” he said. “Sounds nice.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Steve?”

It was a few weeks after the puzzle incident, sometime after midnight, and Bucky’s voice had worked its way into Steve’s sleeping mind. Distantly at first, and for a long time—too long, Steve thought as he clawed his way awake.

“Steve?”

Bucky’s voice sounded far away— _the bathroom_ , he thought dimly—and he hauled himself bodily out of the bed, groggily staggering to the bathroom where Bucky was calling him.

It took far too long for him to realize that the liquid Bucky was sitting in was blood.

“No,” he said, grabbing a towel and dropping to his knees, cracking them against the tile. He pressed the towel against Bucky’s bleeding ankle with one hand and pried the knife out of his hand with the other, throwing it into the shower.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said faintly. He was so pale— _too pale_ , Steve thought, and he lifted the towel away to evaluate the wound.

He’d carved a gash in his ankle alongside his Achilles tendon—just above the artery, Steve realized as he restored pressure on the wound. The cut hadn’t gone deep enough, not even close, but it was deep enough to bleed a lot, deep enough to scare Steve.

And Bucky. He was shaking now, his face blank with shock but tears running down his face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“You’re okay,” Steve said, his heart pounding as his adrenaline kicked in. “You’re okay, baby.” He took Bucky’s hand and pressed it tight against the towel. “Can you hold that for me?” he asked.

Bucky nodded, sniffling. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“Hold the towel,” Steve said. When he was sure Bucky was able to do as he asked, he stood up, grabbed the knife, and returned to the bedroom. He shoved the knife—a tactical knife Bucky must have kept from the Army—under his side of the mattress where Bucky wouldn’t think to look for it, and then dragged out the combat first aid kit that Bucky had brought along with his stash of guns and cash from under the bed.

He returned to the bathroom and spread out a fresh towel beneath Bucky’s foot. He cleaned the wound and sutured it—it would scar, but it would hold—then padded the ankle with gauze and immobilized it with an Ace bandage so he wouldn’t tear the stitches out. 

“Can you stand?” Steve asked, drawing Bucky’s arm around his shoulders and hoisting him up.

He helped Bucky hop to the bed and then lie down, elevating his foot on a pillow.

Bucky was breathing shallowly and his eyes were wet, but he didn’t cry.

“I’m sorry,” he said for the fourth time.

“Shh,” Steve said, kissing his forehead. “You’re safe now.”

“I lost my nerve again, Stevie.”

“I know, baby,” Steve said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “But you called for me,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”

“I’m sorry I’m like this.”

Steve swallowed and stroked his brow. “I’m going to give you a sedative, okay? And then I’m going to call Jenny.”

“I didn’t want to do it,” Bucky whispered. “It was a mistake. I didn’t want to do it.”

“Shh,” Steve said. He went back to the bathroom to get a glass of water and the pills Jenny had prescribed for emergencies. He gave Bucky two and helped him sit up to take them, before helping him back onto the pillow and drawing the covers around him.

“I love you,” he said, kissing Bucky’s forehead. “It’s going to be okay. Rest now.”

Bucky’s eyelids began to flutter quickly after, and soon he had slipped into a sleep deep enough for Steve to feel safe leaving him alone.

Jenny was concerned—very concerned—but felt Bucky would be all right where he was. The cut had been messy but shallow and he’d called for Steve right away. Those were good signs. She cleared her schedule for the next afternoon, even though it wasn’t one of Bucky’s usual days, and said they’d do daily calls for the rest of the week to make sure he’d be okay.

Steve spent the rest of the night collecting all of Bucky’s guns and tactical knives, securing them in the tool locker in the shed out back. The razors went into the trash outside, and the kitchen knives went into the bedroom safe. He spent an hour looking at the forks, the fireplace poker, the axe by the woodpile, wondering whether they posed a danger or not.

What had triggered it? Steve turned the day over and over again in his mind. He’d had therapy that day, and he’d been quiet afterward—but that was often the case on therapy days. He’d eaten most of his dinner, he’d worked on his puzzle, he’d curled up with Steve on the sofa to watch a Mets-Cardinals game. It had rained that evening, a thunderstorm, but he'd seemed to handle it fine, even when a thunderclap right overhead shook the house. 

They’d gone to bed after that; they’d fooled around a little but stopped when Bucky’s dick decided to nap through the whole thing, and he’d wound up falling asleep with his book on his chest and his bedside light still on as the rain pattered on. The last thing Steve remembered before falling asleep himself was reaching over to switch off the light.

Maybe he had been more withdrawn than usual, Steve thought, and he hadn’t realized it. Maybe he had been jumpier, maybe Steve had said something to trigger him. Maybe the thunder had gotten to him, and he hadn't noticed. Maybe they shouldn’t have tried to have sex—Bucky tried to stay optimistic when his meds foiled their plans, but maybe it was bothering him more than he let on. He’d already fought so hard over the past year to recover the pleasure of it, and Steve knew how dismayed he was to discover that all that ground had been lost. Or maybe he’d had a flashback in his sleep. 

Or maybe Steve would never know.

 _That_ thought was terrifying. If Steve knew what had caused it, he could remove the threat, but if he didn’t—if Bucky was unable to name it for him—then nowhere was safe. Steve could never keep him safe.

And that was unbearable.

_I can’t lose you again._

The terror lanced through him like an icepick. He was glad Bucky had gone for the artery in his ankle instead of his neck—the bum foot would give Steve the excuse he needed to keep him home and hover over him for a few days until they had a better idea of what Bucky needed and what they might need to differently next time, if there was one.

But right now, Steve couldn't bear the thought of a next time. He had to, of course, had to do it for Bucky’s sake, but Christ, it was too much. Sometimes it was too much.

His eyes began to ache.

 _No_ , he ordered himself. Crying was for showers. That was the deal. _Not now._

But a stubborn sob escaped his throat and he knew that yes, it was now, it was happening now whether he liked it or not. He was going to fall to his knees on the kitchen rug, he was going to curl over onto his forearms and clutch his head, and he was going to sob until he couldn’t breathe.

It had been years since he’d broken down like this—it hadn’t been this bad even when his mother died. The night after Bucky moved to Indiana, he thought. That had been the last time he’d cried this hard.

Eventually exhaustion caught up with him. He lay down next to Bucky, his arm across his waist so he’d wake if Bucky tried to get out of bed, and fell into a fitful doze.

The sun was well up by the time he awoke. Bucky was tugging on his hand and murmuring his name.

“Stevie,” he was saying softly. “I need the bathroom.”

Steve yawned and stood and helped Bucky hop to the bathroom. As he helped Bucky with his shorts and helped him sit on the toilet without putting weight on his foot, he realized the floor was still a mess, the bloody towel lying in a heap by the tub.

He helped Bucky wash up and brush his teeth, then helped him hop back to the bed. He brought Bucky fresh clothes before settling him back on a nest of pillows. He brought Bucky his morning meds and his breakfast, delivering both on a tray he rested across Bucky’s lap.

Bucky said nothing. He took his pills and picked at his breakfast, eventually managing a few bites of toast. He finished his coffee, at least, and nodded a silent thanks when Steve brought him his laptop and the book of crosswords he’d been working through as a way to combat the brain fog the pills gave him.

“You have an appointment with Jenny at one,” Steve said, crouching by the nightstand to plug Bucky’s laptop charger in. “I’m going to make sure you keep it.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said softly. “Steve—”

“Don’t fucking apologize again,” Steve said, more angrily than he intended. “We just—we just need to deal with this,” he said softly.

“I know,” Bucky said. His voice was small, abashed, and Steve winced when he said, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Steve said. “Just—will you promise me something? Next time you feel that way, will you just tell me? I won’t get mad. I just—” He felt his voice waver. “Just tell me, okay? And we’ll deal with it together.”

Bucky looked at him. He was exhausted, Steve could tell—the sedative knocked him out but it didn’t give him good sleep—and he looked beaten down in a way that Steve had never seen in him before. “You should take me to a hospital,” he said quietly.

“Do you need to go to a hospital?” Steve asked, anxiety thrumming through him.

“I don’t know,” Bucky said. “Last night was bad.”

“Yeah, it was,” Steve said. “Were you telling me the truth last night when you said you didn’t mean it?”

Bucky nodded. “It was just this moment, you know? Where I couldn’t see a way out. I don't even know where it came from. But as soon as I felt the knife go in, I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted. I realized—this is dumb, but I looked at myself and I realized that the reason I was cutting my foot was because Hydra took my other wrist away, and I thought, very clearly, that if I went through with this, I was just going to finish their work for them. And I couldn’t do that.”

Steve blinked back exhausted tears as relief flooded through him. “That’s good, Bucky,” he said. He squeezed Bucky’s unhurt leg. “Maybe next time try to remember that before you pick up the knife, though, huh?”

“If I know you, there isn’t a knife left anywhere in this house, is there.”

“Or guns,” Steve said. “I left the butter knives.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t get that bad,” Bucky said.

“You’ll tell me if it does,” Steve said, too tired to hide the urgency in his voice. It wasn’t a question. “You don’t have to explain or anything. You just need to tell me you’re in trouble, okay?”

Bucky nodded. He was ashamed, Steve could tell, and afraid.

He leaned over and gave Bucky a long kiss on the forehead. “Now I know what you felt like when you had to call 911 for me when I had that asthma attack.”

“Payback’s a bitch,” Bucky said, with a rueful laugh. “I’m sorry, Stevie. I know I scared you.”

 _Bucky could never know how much_ , Steve decided. Instead of responding, he reached for the remote to the TV mounted on the wall across the room and then climbed into bed next to him.

As he did, Bucky reached for his hand and kissed his knuckles. “Try to get some sleep,” he said softly. “I promise I’ll still be here when you wake.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was Steve’s birthday, and Bucky was having a good day.

It was a Saturday, so he didn’t have therapy. He had done his journaling and his guided reflection. He had inventoried his feelings and finished his breathing exercises. He had gone for his run—his sanity check, he called it—and showered. He helped Steve make sandwiches for lunch and sat at the breakfast bar because the puzzle was still nowhere near done. They ate in companionable silence.

Steve didn’t want to do anything special. Later, they would go swimming in the lake and nap in the hammock. They might grill some burgers. They’d drink the good scotch and watch the sun set. Tonight would be hard for both of them, with the fireworks yanking them back to Afghanistan, and Steve tried not to worry about whether Bucky would try—

 _Stop_.

It had been seven weeks and three days—not that Steve was counting—since that night in the bathroom. The cut on his ankle was nothing more than an angry red scar now, one more thing he'd survived. Bucky had been doing well. He’d been working hard. The bad days were growing further and further apart. Tonight would be hard, and Steve would watch him like a hawk, but he had to believe they’d get through it.

But for now, it was peaceful. The windows were open and outside they could hear the trees rustle and the birds call, and the quiet lap of the lake against the shore. There was music on the stereo—something mellow by a band they’d both liked in high school.

The sun fell through the window across Bucky’s face in a pretty way, coaxing out the red in his hair and the blue in his eyes, and for a moment Steve thought he’d never seen anyone so beautiful in his entire life.

The weight he’d started to gain from the pills was beginning to make his face softer now—make everything softer now. Steve didn’t mind and if Bucky did, he didn’t say.

The pills made him more forgetful now, too, or sometimes Bucky would just _get stuck_ , as he described it—when they were making lunch, Steve had noticed him staring at the mustard bottle for a too-long moment before reaching over to pop the lid open for him. This kind of thing happened so often they didn’t even acknowledge it anymore—it would get better once he was ready to step down his dosage, but for now, it was a small price to pay for stability.

Sex, too. They’d taken a break from it, because it was only making Bucky frustrated and sad when his body refused to respond, and that was the last thing he needed to be feeling right now. Steve was a little relieved, too, if he was being honest about it—receiving pleasure without giving it in return had never been much fun for him, and he had no desire to rub it in. So he contented himself with jerking off in the shower and rediscovering the simpler pleasures of other kinds of touch they could still share. They could still kiss. They could still hug. They could still snuggle together on the sofa. It was enough, Steve thought. No matter how long Bucky needed the pills, it would be enough.

“What?” Bucky asked with a quiet laugh. “Did I space out again?”

“No. Just having a moment,” Steve said, knocking his knee against Bucky’s.

“Oh, don’t get sappy on me now, Stevie,” Bucky said, waving his sandwich at him. “It ain’t that bad, is it?”

“Right now?” Steve said. “No. Right now, everything’s perfect.”

Bucky gave him a tight smile, the unspoken _later_ hanging between them—the next bad dream Steve could not prevent, the next jag of shattering grief that Steve could not console, the next night of restless, frantic pacing as Steve begged him to come back to bed, the next cluster of long silent hours spent curled up on the sofa, trapped inside a fog of disgust and shame so dark Steve had no words to pierce. The next—well.

Steve watched him consider it, watched the fear of it briefly flare across his eyes, watched him take a sip of his iced tea, and nod toward the stereo. “I always liked this song,” he said. “It’s pretty.”

Today was a good day.

Steve put his sandwich down and tugged on his sleeve. “Get up,” he said, sliding off his barstool and holding out his hand. “Come here.”

Bucky laughed and shook his head but did as Steve asked, taking Steve’s hand and letting Steve pull him in close. Steve wrapped his other arm around Bucky’s back and held their clasped hands to his chest and began to dance.

Bucky smiled bashfully against Steve’s cheek. “When’d you learn how to do this, anyway?”

“Peggy,” Steve said. “No one ever told me how bored you could get in the middle of a war.”

Bucky hummed an agreement and curled his fingers around Steve’s. “You’re good at it,” he said. “This is nice.”

“It is,” Steve said, planting a little kiss on the side of his cheek.

“Wish I could hold you right,” Bucky said.

“This is right,” Steve said, tightening his hold around Bucky’s back. “For us. This is right.”

Bucky didn’t respond right away, just rested his head against Steve’s and let Steve turn him around the kitchen. He was going along with it, Steve knew, trying to be happy and present, to find joy where he could, but in that moment Steve believed he felt it, felt the small exquisite joy of dancing with someone he loved in the kitchen on a perfect summer day, with the windows open and the curtains fluttering and a song he’d always loved on the stereo.

“Are you okay, Stevie?” Bucky asked quietly.

Steve felt his breath catch.

 _I don’t know_ , he didn’t say. _Yes. No._

“Yeah, Buck,” he said, kissing his temple. “I’m okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Graphic aftermath of a suicide attempt, and Steve begins to experience considerable caregiver stress. 
> 
> (I love you and I love them and everything's going to be okay in the end.)
> 
> \---
> 
> Thank you for your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Renewed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Bea: Stop rewriting at the last minute. Just...stop.)   
> Anyway, things start to look up.

“Nervous?” Steve asked.

It was late September, and the trees on the mountains were brilliantly aflame with turning leaves. Sometimes it was so gorgeous it took Steve’s breath away. 

Today was a big day—maybe the biggest of all, because today was the day they were going to find out whether the activation words still worked, whether it was safe for him to think about going home.

“What do you think?” Bucky said wryly, though he managed a small smile. He was sitting cross-legged on the sofa in his favorite sweater, a soft baggy thing Steve had found in the village during a supply run that he knew Bucky would love. His hair was in a ridiculous stage of growing out, an untamable fluffy cloud that Steve loved to ruffle his fingers through, though he’d finally submitted to a trim the week before that had at least given it a bit of shape.

Steve was nervous, too. Bucky was doing so much better now. He still had his bad days, still got spooked sometimes, but he could go weeks without a panic attack or a nightmare, and from where Steve sat, that felt like a miracle. Steve still felt a twisting stab of fear when Bucky seemed to be gone too long for his run, or didn't answer his call right away, or wasn't in bed when he awoke in the night, but he had learned to bear it, like everything else. But he would be lying if he said he wasn't terrified about what it would do to both of them if this didn't work today. 

They passed the morning quietly, trying to ignore the fact that Natasha was due to arrive a little after lunchtime, that Steve was going to handcuff Bucky to the cast-iron stove in the living room while Natasha read the sequence to him in her perfect St. Petersburg accent, that Jenny would observe through the camera of an iPad, ready to talk him down if he needed it.

But of course, they couldn’t ignore it. They barely ate lunch, and when they heard Natasha’s car crunch on the gravel outside, Steve saw Bucky go pale.

“We can back out if you want,” he said. His heart was pounding. “We don’t need to do this today.”

Bucky shook his head. “No,” he said, clenching his jaw as they heard Natasha’s steps on the front porch. “I need to know.”

“Hey guys,” Natasha said softly, letting herself in. She was dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck—though not quite entirely off-duty, Steve observed, because she had a taser on her hip.

Steve looked at his watch and nodded. Bucky pulled a chair over to the stove and held out his wrist so Steve could snap the handcuff onto it. Steve gave the other cuff to him to fasten onto the stove—he wanted Bucky to feel as in control as he could, under the circumstances—and then kissed him when it was done.

“I love you,” he said. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it, okay?” _I don't know how, but we will._

Bucky swallowed and nodded. Natasha opened a video call with Jenny and set the iPad on a nearby table so she could see.

“How are you feeling, Bucky?” Jenny asked. “This is a hard test today.”

“Scared,” Bucky admitted. “Anxious. Kind of feeling like it’s going to fail and I’ll be like this forever, maybe.”

“Just remember your mantra and your breathing,” Jenny said. “Take your time and let us know when you’re ready.”

After a long moment, Bucky looked up at Natasha. “Okay.”

Natasha called the words up on her phone. “Желание,” she said, glancing up at him. He was staring intently at a spot on the floor between them. “Ржавый. Семнадцать. Рассвет.”

“No,” Bucky said softly, shutting his eyes and shaking his head. “You don't own me anymore.”

“Печь. Девять. Добросердечный,” Natasha said.

“You don't own me anymore,” Bucky said, more urgently now.

“Возвращение на Родину.”

“No. You don't own me anymore,” he insisted tearfully. 

“Товарный вагон.”

“You don't own me anymore!” He was shaking, almost sobbing, and Natasha glanced at Steve as though seeking permission to complete the test.

Steve nodded.

“Are you ready to comply, _soldat_?” she asked.

Bucky shook his head. “No.”

“Stand up.”

“No.”

She repeated the command in Russian, so forcefully Steve almost decked her.

“Fuck you!” he roared.

“Okay,” Jenny said. “I think we can call that a success.” Steve darted over to release Bucky’s hand from the cuffs and ease his arm down.

“Hi, baby,” Steve said, kissing his hand and stroking his cheek, thumbing his tears away. “You did it.”

Bucky slumped against Steve’s shoulder and wept. 

And so did Steve.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I need new pants,” Bucky said ruefully a few weeks later, frowning at the red crease the waistband of his sweats had left on his waist as he undressed for bed. His long daily runs had done little to stem the effect of the pills on his weight, blanketing the definition of his muscles, rounding out his cheeks, even softening the contour of his hand and feet.

“Borrow mine,” Steve said. “We’ll go shopping this week. Anything else? Underwear?”

“Probably,” Bucky said, plucking the elastic away and frowning again. “At least my shirts still fit.”

“I love you,” Steve said, setting his book aside. “And for the record, I like the way you look.”

Bucky laughed softly as he threw the jeans toward the hamper. “Stop.”

Steve climbed across the bed to take Bucky’s hand in his and kiss his palm. “It means you’re alive, and you’re _here_ , with me,” he said, turning Bucky’s palm over and kissing the back. “And that’s the most beautiful thing in the world to me.”

Bucky flushed and shook his head. “That’s a good line.”

“It means I can do this,” Steve said, kissing his hand again, then wrapped his arms around Bucky’s waist, pressing his cheek to his soft belly. He could hear Bucky’s heartbeat here—gloriously, beautifully strong. “It means I can do this.” He placed a little kiss to the skin near his navel. “It means I can lend you clothes—" kiss— "and bake you cookies—" kiss— "and make you laugh.” Another kiss. “It means I can go to sleep next to you at night, and it means I can wake up next to you in the morning,” he said, delivering another kiss. “For the rest of our lives, if you’ll have me.”

Bucky leaned over to embrace him back and kiss the top of his head. “I like that idea,” he said. 

Steve smiled and squeezed him tight. “Okay.”

“Did we just decide—?”

“I think we did,” Steve said, laughing a little. “Sorry I don’t have a ring or anything. I've been thinking about it for a while and I guess my brain decided right now was the right time to ask.”

Bucky bent over to give Steve a much more passionate kiss than usual, and then laughed softly.

“What?”

“It’s funny you should mention rings,” Bucky said, breaking away to reach into the nightstand for the toy box they’d neglected for months and lift out his newest acquisition: a soft silicone cock ring. “And now that you just unintentionally gave me the world’s greatest lead-in, I thought it would be a crime if we didn’t try it out together.”

Steve leaned back to look up at him. “You’re sure?” he asked.

Bucky nodded and blushed. “I’ve done a couple of practice runs in the shower that have gone okay,” he said. “I thought maybe—it’s a little tricky to find the sweet spot for me right now, so I thought you could touch me while I jerk off? Is that weird?”

Steve grinned, feeling his dick twitch at the prospect. “Not weird at all,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Bucky skimmed out of his boxers, and Steve followed suit. Then Steve rose up on his knees to kiss Bucky softly on the mouth, then made his way down his throat, gently nibbling and flicking his tongue along the curve of his shoulder and across the sensitive divot of his collarbones.

Bucky played with his hair as Steve ducked and caught one of Bucky’s nipples between his teeth, gently sucking and worrying it with his tongue. Bucky gave a low hum of pleasure and Steve kissed his way over to the other, smiling when he felt Bucky shift his weight a little to push against him.

“Hand me the ring?” Bucky asked, bending over to kiss him.

Steve sat back on his heels to help him put it on, kissing his soft cock when it was done. Then he helped him lay back on the bed, arranging the pillows just as he preferred, and dressed Bucky’s hand with lube. 

“At your service,” Steve said, lying alongside him.

“You know what I like,” Bucky said, taking his cock into his hand. “Just do that. I’ll tell you if it’s not working.”

“You got it,” Steve said.

Bucky turned his head toward him, and Steve began to kiss him as Bucky stroked himself, letting Bucky bite and suck on his lip as Steve skimmed his fingernails up and down the sensitive skin of his neck. He pinched and worried his nipples and circled his navel with his fingertip. He slid his palm all over Bucky’s body as they kissed, grabbing and massaging his tits, rubbing his thigh, letting Bucky bite and suck on his thumb while he sucked and nibbled his earlobe.

It was starting to work—Bucky was beginning to breathe hard, and Steve began to breathe harder in response because he knew it turned Bucky on to hear him get turned on, and because Steve honestly loved watching Bucky get off. He shifted his position and gave Bucky his other thumb to suck while he pressed soft, nibbling kisses down Bucky’s chest and belly, flicking his tongue against his skin and toying with his nipples.

They played for ages, Steve hopscotching around all of Bucky’s sensitive areas to make sure each one got his full attention, showering him with praise at every step.

“Jesus, you’re so hot when you do that,” Steve said, licking a stripe up Bucky’s neck. He could feel his own dick getting properly hard. “I could watch you touch yourself all day.”

Bucky hummed against Steve’s thumb, toying with it with his tongue.

“I love feeling you do that,” Steve said. “It makes me think about how well you suck my cock.” He pushed his dick against Bucky’s thigh. “God, it turns me on so much to think about.”

That did something fun to Bucky—he groaned and picked up the pace. “Touch my balls,” Bucky grunted, and Steve did, kissing him as Bucky stroked, and Steve thought it was the hottest goddamned thing he’d ever seen.

“Christ, you’re gorgeous,” Steve murmured, pushing his cock harder against Bucky’s thigh, already damp with precome. “I’m gonna come just watching you, you’re so gorgeous.”

Bucky gave a breathless laugh. “I think—” he said, glancing up for a moment. “I think I’m close,” he said. “I want you to touch yourself, Stevie. I want you to get yourself off with me.”

Steve sighed as he took his own cock in his hand, and was gratified when he saw Bucky’s pupils flare.

Steve smeared his precome down his cock— _thank you, serum_ —and began to stroke. They kissed until they couldn’t kiss anymore, their coordination falling apart as their ecstasy rose.

Bucky’s breath became soft, windy cries, and the sound of his pleasure drove Steve wild, and the sight of it too—the crinkled brow, the parted lips, the little bursts of sweet agony in his face as he approached his peak.

Steve picked up his pace, biting the pillow and tonguing it for the friction, then used his free hand to pinch his own nipple, determined to come when Bucky did.

“Oh, fuck, Stevie—” Bucky panted, and Steve began to pant too, because it was so fucking hot, touching himself while Bucky touched himself, with their eyes locked on one another’s, and he was so close, they were so close—

“I’m gonna—” Steve said, and then Bucky gasped and groaned, and then Steve came harder than he had in months, spattering Bucky’s hip and thigh.

“Oh God,” Bucky gasped, letting his hand fall back on the mattress. “Oh, fuck, my arm’s gonna be sore for a week. That took forever.”

“Shut up,” Steve said, planting a kiss on his mouth. He released Bucky from the cock ring. “It was perfect.”

Bucky laughed weakly. “You’re sweet.”

“Next time I’m just gonna watch so you can show me what works now.”

Bucky grinned. “That would be fun.”

Steve curled up against him and kissed his shoulder. “You’ll have to tie me up first, though, because I don’t know how I could watch a show like that without getting distracted.”

Bucky hummed and rolled over to face him. “ _That_ would be really fun.”

“Where did we put the handcuffs?” Steve asked, kissing his nose.

Bucky laughed then, and pressed his forehead to Steve’s. “Slow down, cowboy,” he said. “I’m not 100 percent yet.”

Steve kissed him again. “I can wait.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The leaves crunched underfoot as they made their way up the twisting trail, headlamps bobbing as they ran, breath clouding in the early October chill. Steve led, moderating his pace so he wouldn’t outrun Bucky, warning of tree roots and holes he spotted along the way.

It had been four weeks since Bucky’s final test—Natasha had stayed for three days, and they’d tested the sequence 10 times to make sure it had been extinguished—and Bucky had decided he was ready to try to return to the world. He'd begun to taper down some of his meds. He was starting to think about the future in a way he hadn't in years. Slowly, surviving was starting to become living. 

Tomorrow they would return to Washington to pack up Steve’s apartment and move his things into Bucky’s. They planned to stay in Washington long enough for Bucky to undergo a series of surgeries at Walter Reed to implant an experimental neural interface for a new kind of ultra-responsive prosthetic arm designed and donated by Tony Stark—who declared in a press release that he couldn’t imagine a better test pilot.

After that, who knew? Maybe back to the cabin, or maybe they’d move back to Brooklyn, or maybe they’d go somewhere else entirely. The future was open.

Steve knew he should be optimistic about it, but the truth was, he was terrified. He had no idea what he was going to do now, no idea how he could exist in the world after the past six months. It had been hard enough coming back from Afghanistan—returning to a normal life seemed impossible now.

And yet it was important. He knew this. More than most, he knew how short life was, how precarious it could be, and he couldn’t bear the idea of wasting it. He just hoped that once he got back, he’d be ready to take it on.

They slowed to a walk as they got close to the top—the trail was too steep and rocky to run safely—and after one final scramble they emerged from the trees to a clear, rocky area where they could sit on a boulder and rest while the sun began to emerge.

“I could make a great sniper nest up here,” Bucky said appreciatively as he sat down, then grinned ruefully. “Sorry, I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.”

“We’ll go out to your friend’s range when we get back to D.C. Get some target practice in.” Steve cocked a finger gun and pretended to blow across the barrel. “See if I’ve still got the magic touch.”

“Oh my God, you’re so smooth,” Bucky laughed.

“That’s me,” Steve said, settling in next to him. “Smooth operator. Smooth as silk. Smooth as—”

“Shut up, you dork,” Bucky said, stopping his riff with a kiss. “How about I stick to the guns, and you stick to throwing whiteboards?”

“I’m gonna kill Nat for telling you about that.”

“In my moment of greatest need, you showed up with a whiteboard.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Steve protested. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

Bucky smiled and nodded. “Yeah,” he said, leaning into Steve’s arm. The sun was beginning to break over the mountains beyond the lake, a bright rising streak of pure light that set the whole valley below on fire. “I’m alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for any mistakes in the Russian. 
> 
> Stay tuned for the epilogue tomorrow! 
> 
> Also if this line pinged your interest - “You’ll have to tie me up first, though, because I don’t know how I could watch a show like that without getting distracted.” - then you might enjoy [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27840979), which was inspired by it. 
> 
> \---
> 
> I love your comments. 
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


	16. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Breathe.

“Wait, let me do it,” Bucky said, jogging ahead to open the door. He reached forward carefully with his left hand and closed it around the handle, then carefully pulled it open. The movement wasn’t quite fluent yet—his hand-eye coordination still wasn’t great and he had to pause twice to adjust the positions of his elbow and shoulder—but it was much better than it had been a few weeks ago, when he could barely keep hold of a coffee cup.

The arm— _his_ arm, he was calling it now—was made of black carbon fiber with a fully articulated hand and elbow and, unlike the last one, a shoulder he could control. Most importantly, it could relay pressure and positional feedback that would give Bucky much more precision than any other prosthetic arm was capable of. With time and training, Bucky would be able to button his shirts and type and play video games and all kinds of things he hadn’t been able to do with his old prosthesis. 

Wear Steve's ring, come next June. 

But not quite yet. The arm was still pretty clumsy sometimes, but aside from a few bursts of impatience, Bucky seemed to be handling it well, laughing it off when he dropped or fumbled something, or had to get Steve’s help when he got stuck holding something he couldn't figure out how to let go of.

He was still seeing Jenny—in person, now, finally—once a week, and he spent several hours a day debriefing the surviving intelligence community on everything he knew about Hydra. That was grueling in its own way, but Steve could tell how much lighter he was for it, finding a way to help repair some of the damage he’d been used to create. It would be years before Pierce would go to trial, they knew, but for now he was locked up tight in a hole so deep that they felt safe enough knowing he'd never come out.

It had been 12 weeks since they moved back to Washington, almost seven months since the Triskelion. It was chilly and damp now, almost Christmas, and Steve couldn’t help but think about how much had changed since the last Christmas they’d spent together, nearly 20 years before. In a few days they’d go up to Baltimore to spend Christmas with Becca, spending the night so they could open presents with Lucy in the morning, and Steve found himself wishing his mom was still alive to join them.

Nearly everyone else had scattered—Maria had gotten a job at Stark Headquarters in New York, while Sharon had moved to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin and Darcy found a job doing something or other with an astrophysicist out in New Mexico. Fury had started a security consulting firm and was spending most of his time in Europe now, while Natasha had, in typical Natasha fashion, split town without telling anyone where she was going, except to say that it was a vacation, and would be a long one. Christine Everhart was in Iraq, last Steve heard, working out of the _Bulletin_ 's Baghdad bureau. He wasn't sure he could ever forgive her for writing that story about him, but he had to admit that if she hadn't, he wouldn't be here now. It took some of the sting out.

Peggy was back in London to visit her parents for Christmas and pack up her flat, but she’d taken over the remainder of the lease on Steve’s apartment and would be back after the New Year. She had found a job at a global security think tank, and planned to stay in Washington indefinitely.

The reason for that was walking down the hall toward them now, carrying a box of doughnuts and beaming with surprise.

"I'm glad to see you," Sam said. 

"I thought you weren't supposed to be here tonight."

"Just donating some leftover snacks from my group," Sam said. "I'm heading out in a minute."

Steve gave him a tight smile and shoved his hands into his pockets. “You think it’s really all right for me to be here with these guys?”

He looked over Sam’s shoulder at the men and women making their way into the meeting room, some using wheelchairs and canes and prosthetic limbs, others able-bodied but heavy-hearted. Everyone, in their own way, still learning how to carry everything they'd done and seen, still adjusting to whatever their new normal would be.

Steve had no idea what his new normal was going to be. He'd been honorably discharged back in October, and aside from taking care of Bucky, he still had no idea what he was going to do next. They were okay for money for now—his lawyer had negotiated a swift and generous settlement for them both from the government—so he told himself he was happy to play the role of supportive house-husband while Bucky did his thing. Mostly, though, that meant dragging himself out of bed, having breakfast with Bucky in the mornings, going for a quick run so he could say he’d left the apartment, staring blankly at wedding websites, and spending the rest of the day on the sofa trying to figure out—or avoid thinking about—what he was going to do with his life next.

Nothing appealed. He’d been approached by a book publisher about a memoir, which he hadn’t rejected but hadn’t accepted either. He’d also been approached by the faculty at West Point about guest lecturing for a year, but he hadn’t made up his mind about that, either. A dozen speaker’s bureaus were clamoring to add him to their roster, every major news network in the country wanted to interview him—hell, half of them wanted to give him a TV show. Three governors had invited him to establish primary residences in their states and run for Congress. He thought about finishing art school. He thought about going to law school. He was leaning toward founding a charitable foundation of some sort, though for what he hadn’t decided. 

He was somehow simultaneously exhausted and wired, jittery with unfocused anxiety, every uncertainty or decision making him vaguely panicky. He hated going outside during the day, hated being seen—it terrified him in some undefinable way to be recognized, and every time he was, he felt like a fraud. He needed an entire day to psych himself up for dinner or drinks out, then locked himself in the bathroom and tried not to cry with relief when they finally got home.

Nights were no better, peppered with an unceasing reel of blood and smoke and ear-ringing noise, Bucky crying and bleeding on the bathroom floor with a razor blade in his hand, Christine Everhart gasping for breath, Peggy screaming in pain as she was cut out of the Jeep and Junior’s shattered head in her lap, the teenage boy in the village outside Jalalabad pointing the ancient AK-47—

Bucky knew he wasn't okay and tried to ask about it, but Steve brushed him off. He kept telling himself it was temporary, that he’d been through a lot, that of course it had kicked up a lot of bad feelings, and that Bucky had been through enough as it was. 

It wasn’t until he lost his temper with Bucky over a missing t-shirt—shouting and dumping out drawers and laundry baskets until he found it—that he tearfully admitted he needed to get some help.

So here he was, at the Tuesday night group for veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq at Walter Reed. It wasn't Bucky's group, because Sam said they should both to be able to speak freely, and it wasn't one of Sam's groups, either, for the same reason. Which meant if Steve was going to go through with this, he was going to have to go in alone.

He didn't know if he could. 

“You have as much right to be here as anyone else,” Sam said. He glanced at his watch. “Take a moment if you want. They're still setting up.”

“You don’t have to talk tonight,” Bucky said after Sam went in. “It’s okay to just listen. I don’t think I said anything for the first month.”

“I don’t know,” Steve said, shifting his weight back and forth.

“I’ll be right out here,” Bucky said, nodding toward the bench in the hall. “You can leave if it gets to be too much.”

Steve bounced on his heels and looked up at the buzzing fluorescent light overhead. “Why is this so hard?” he asked irritably. _Because nobody cares about Captain America's problems. Because nobody would believe he has any. Because nobody would believe how much it hurt._

“Because it _is_ hard,” Bucky said, with infuriating implacability.

“You know, therapy is making you really insufferable,” Steve groused.

“Yeah, but you love me anyway,” Bucky said, stepping in to kiss him and then pat him on the chest. “And _I_ love _you_ and I believe you can do this.”

“Okay,” Steve said, then drew a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, nodding and turning toward the open door behind them. The group was beginning to take their places in the circle and Sam glanced out into the hall as he finished setting out the doughnuts to see whether Steve had made up his mind. “Okay,” he said.

A metallic creak behind him caught his ear, and he found himself glancing around to its source. It was a Hispanic man about his age in a Marines sweatshirt and athletic shorts, making his slow, careful way up the hall on a pair of prosthetic legs that were obviously still new to him. He grinned as recognition flared across his face, and he nodded inside as he touched the doorway to catch his balance before pivoting into the room.

“Hey, Cap,” he said. “You with us tonight?”

Steve exhaled hard and squeezed Bucky’s hand one more time. “Yeah,” he said, stepping forward to join him. “I am.”

-FIN-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! This fic was such a labor of love, and your comments mean the world to me. 
> 
> And thank you again to the brilliant Ladra for her beta work! All mistakes are entirely mine. 
> 
> \---
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


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